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Born on the island of Saint Lucia, a former British colony in the West Indies, poet and playwright Derek Walcott was trained as a painter but turned to writing as a young man. He published his first poem in the local newspaper at the age of 14. Five years later, he borrowed $200 to print his first collection, 25 Poems, which he distributed on street corners. Walcott's major breakthrough came with the collection In a Green Night: Poems 1948-1960 (1962), a book which celebrates the Caribbean and its history as well as investigates the scars of colonialism. Throughout a long and distinguished career, Walcott returned to those same themes of language, power, and place. His later collections include Tiepolo's Hound (2000), The Prodigal (2004), Selected Poems (2007), White Egrets (2010), and Morning, Paramin (2016). In 1992, Walcott won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Nobel committee described his work as "a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment."

Since the 1950s Walcott divided his time between Boston, New York, and Saint Lucia. His work resonates with Western canon and Island influences, shifting between Caribbean patois and English, and often addressing his English and West Indian ancestry. According to Los Angeles Times Book Review contributor Arthur Vogelsang, "These continuing polarities shoot an electricity to each other which is questioning and beautiful and which helps form a vision altogether Caribbean and international, personal (him to you, you to him), independent, and essential for readers of contemporary literature on all the continents." Known for his technical control, erudition, and large canvases, Walcott was, according to poet and critic Sean O'Brien, "one of the handful of poets currently at work in English who are capable of making a convincing attempt to write an epic ... His work is conceived on an oceanic scale and one of its fundamental concerns is to give an account of the simultaneous unity and division created by the ocean and by human dealings with it."

Many readers and critics point to Omeros (1990), an epic poem reimagining the Trojan War as a Caribbean fishermen's fight, as Walcott's major achievement. The book is "an effort to touch every aspect of Caribbean experience," according to O'Brien who also described it as an ars poetica, concerned "with art itself-its meaning and importance and the nature of an artistic vocation." In reviewing Walcott's Selected Poems (2007), poet Glyn Maxwell ascribes Walcott's power as a poet not so much to his themes as to his ear: "The verse is constantly trembling with a sense of the body in time, the self slung across metre, whether metre is steps, or nights, or breath, whether lines are days, or years, or tides."

Walcott was also a renowned playwright. In 1971 he won an Obie Award for his play Dream on Monkey Mountain, which the New Yorker described as "a poem in dramatic form." Walcott's plays generally treat aspects of the West Indian experience, often dealing with the socio-political and epistemological implications of post-colonialism and drawing upon various genres such as the fable, allegory, folk, and morality play. With his twin brother, he cofounded the Trinidad Theater Workshop in 1950; in 1981, while teaching at Boston University, he founded the Boston Playwrights' Theatre. He also taught at Columbia University, Yale University, Rutgers University, and Essex University in England.

In addition to his Nobel Prize, Walcott's honors included a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, and, in 1988, the Queen's Medal for Poetry. He was an honorary member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He died in 2017.

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Born on the island of Saint Lucia, a former British colony in the West Indies, poet and playwright Derek Walcott was trained as a painter but turned to writing as a young man. He published his first poem in the local newspaper at the age of 14.

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Hyper-Imperialism: A Dangerous Decadent New Stage

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Our latest study explores how the decline of Global North hegemony has shifted the geopolitical landscape and opened new possibilities for emergent organisations of the Global South.

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https://www.publicationstudio.biz/books/situationer-workbook-cookbook/

A book in two volumes on transformative pedagogy and teaching in times of crises.

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https://www.academia.edu/43336771/Everything_Gardens_Growing_in_the_Ruins_of_Modernity_Aus_den_Ruinen_der_Moderne_wachsen
Published by ADOCS/NGBK Berlin- A poetic/ethical document on the social pedagogy of the NachbarschaftsAkademie for the coming 99 years of cosmopolitical transformation in Berlin and the world.

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Global learning in a volatile world

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A 24-hour event that proposes ways of learning through uncertainty and holding space collectively in uncertain times.

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to sleep comfortably in common (which is politics)

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Everything Gardens: Working Notes Towards a Solidarity Economy

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Accounting for Life under Capitalism

Miranda Joseph

Reveals how credit, debt, and accounting shape and influence our lives

240 Pages, 6 x 9 in

eBook

9781452941608

Published: September 1, 2014

BUY

Paperback

9780816687442

Published: September 1, 2014

BUY

Details

Debt to Society

Accounting for Life under Capitalism

Miranda Joseph

ISBN: 9781452941608

240 Pages

10

8 x 5

Praise+

" Debt to Society provides an innovative and ambitious scholarly intervention across a wide swath of fields, with much fresh thinking and provocative reframing in every one. Miranda Joseph analyzes the diverse and conflicted neoliberal norm of entrepreneurial subjectivity, searching for and illuminating its possible breaking points." -Lisa Duggan, New York University

"I've been distressed by the increasing focus on debt as a central instrument of social control. Miranda Joseph offers a much richer reading of how debt is embedded in a larger system of social control via accounting. But this is no screed against accounting-it is instead a guide to thinking about how we use statistics and other forms of abstraction, and how we might rethink the practice to produce a better world. I learned a lot from it." -Doug Henwood editor, Left Business Observer

Description+

It is commonplace to say that criminals pay their debt to society by spending time in prison, but what is a "debt to society"? How is crime understood as a debt? How has time become the equivalent for crime? And how does criminal debt relate to the kind of debt held by consumers and university students?

In Debt to Society, Miranda Joseph explores modes of accounting as they are used to create, sustain, or transform social relations. Envisioning accounting broadly to include financial accounting, managerial accounting of costs and performance, and the calculation of "debts to society" owed by criminals, Joseph argues that accounting technologies have a powerful effect on social dynamics by attributing credits and debts. From sovereign bonds and securitized credit card debt to student debt and mortgages, there is no doubt that debt and accounting structure our lives.

Exploring central components of neoliberalism (and neoliberalism in crisis) from incarceration to personal finance and university management, Debt to Society exposes the uneven distribution of accountability within our society. Joseph demonstrates how ubiquitous the forces of accounting have become in shaping all aspects of our lives, proposing that we appropriate accounting and offer alternative accounts to turn the present toward a more widely shared well-being.

Author+

Miranda Joseph is professor of gender and women's studies at the University of Arizona. She is author of Against the Romance of Community (Minnesota, 2002).

Table Of Contents+

Contents

Introduction: Modes of Accounting

1. Accounting for Debt: Toward a Methodology of Critical Abstraction
2. Accounting for Justice: Beyond Liberal Calculations of Debt and Crime
3. Accounting for Time: The Entrepreneurial Subject in Crisis
4. Accounting for Gender: Norms and Pathologies of Personal Finance
5. Accounting for Interdisciplinarity: Contesting Value in the Academy

Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index

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It is commonplace to say that criminals pay their debt to society by spending time in prison, but what is a "debt to society"? How is crime understood as...

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A revolutionary collaboration about the world we’re living in now, between two of our most important contemporary thinkers, writers and activists.

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Rehearsals for Living
By Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

Published in June 2022, with Knopf (Canada) and Haymarket: Abolitionist Paper Series (US/UK).
Foreword by Ruth Wilson Gilmore; Afterword by Robin DG Kelley
pre-order in Canada pre-order in US/UK
"This book must be read for its future vocabularies, its political intimacies, its careful assemblage of the materials of our activisms, and its generous and fulsome thinking."
-Dionne Brand
Read more endorsements of Rehearsals for Living
A revolutionary collaboration about the world we're living in now, between two of our most important contemporary thinkers, writers and activists.

When much of the world entered pandemic lockdown in spring 2020, Robyn Maynard, influential author of Policing Black Lives, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, award-winning author of several books, including the recent novel Noopiming, began writing each other letters-a gesture sparked by friendship and solidarity, and by a desire for kinship and connection in a world shattering under the intersecting crises of pandemic, police killings, and climate catastrophe. Their letters soon grew into a powerful exchange on the subject of where we go from here.

Rehearsals is a captivating book, part debate, part dialogue, part lively and detailed familial correspondence between two razor-sharp writers convening on what it means to get free as the world spins into some new orbit. In a genre-defying exchange, the authors collectively envision the possibilities for more liberatory futures during a historic year of Indigenous land defense, prison strikes, and global-Black-led rebellions against policing. By articulating to each other Black and Indigenous perspectives on our unprecedented here and now, and the long-disavowed histories of slavery and colonization that have brought us to this moment in the first place, Maynard and Simpson create something new: a vital demand for a different way forward, and a poetic call to dream up new ways of ordering earthly life.

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A revolutionary collaboration about the world we're living in now, between two of our most important contemporary thinkers, writers and activists.

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1. All Episodes

2. Filter: Fred Moten

This is the slightly cleaned-up audio of our most recent conversation with Fred Moten.

This was recorded on October 25th. Given the evolution of this struggle and the increasingly genocidal character as well as the ongoing resistance, our comments if we were to hold this discussion today on November 11th would...

This is a slightly edited audio version of one of the MAKC livestreams we've hosted on our new Youtube channel. We will continue to polish the audio versions of those livestreams and release them as episodes here as well. Due to the amount of labor that goes into making them viable audio podcast episodes there will be...

In this conversation we speak with Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

Robyn is the author of the bestselling and award-winning book Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present. She is also an assistant professor of Black Feminisms in Canada at University of Toronto. She also...

This is a dialogue between Hanif Abdurraqib and Fred Moten.

Hanif Abdurraqib has been on the show twice before, but we really have not done a proper episode to honor his work. So we wanted to figure out a unique way to commemorate the release of A Little Devil In America: Notes In Praise of Black Performance. It dawned...

This is part 2 of our 2 part conversation with Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, Revisiting The Undercommons In A Time Of Pandemic And Rebellion. In this part of the conversation we focus on their conceptions of homelessness, Black study, the surround, policy and fugitive planning. Moten and Harney also get into a...

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We created this podcast in recognition that there are a number of podcasts for the American "left," but many of them focus heavily on the organizing of social democrats, progressives, and liberal democrats.

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Introduction

"People who are resisting as an everyday act of resistance against injustice, oppression, patriarchy, occupation, is a beautiful act of humanity" says Dr. Abdelfattah Abusrour from Palestine.

This volume contains seven stories of resistance, resilience and regeneration across the world that highlight how peoples proactive responses to the multiple crises the world faces-ecological, socio-cultural, political, economic, spiritual-are widespread and diverse. These stories thread expressions of varied possibilities of defining and organising social life beyond the oppressive structures of capitalism, patriarchy, extractive development, war & conflicts, and commodification of human and natural lives. These stories are lived realities of people from Indigenous Peoples and other rural communities, from urban neighborhoods, from both the Global South and Global North, from both marginalized sections and the privileged elite.

But why is it important to highlight and amplify these stories? What do they offer in efforts to transform the world? We at Global TapestryThe weaving of networks of Alternatives of AlternativesAre activities and initiatives, concepts, worldviews, or action proposals by collectives, groups, organizations, communities, or social movements challenging and replacing the dominant system that perpetuates inequality, exploitation, and unsustainabiity. In the GTA we focus primarily on what we call "radical or transformative alternatives", which we define as initiatives that are attempting to break with the dominant system and take paths towards direct and radical forms of political and economic democracy, localised self-reliance, social justice and equity, cultural and knowledge diversity, and ecological resilience. Their locus is neither the State nor the capitalist economy. They are advancing in the process of dismantling most forms of hierarchies, assuming the principles of sufficiency, autonomy, non-violence, justice and equality, solidarity, and the caring of life and the Earth. They do this in an integral way, not limited to a single aspect of life. Although such initiatives may have some kind of link with capitalist markets and the State, they prioritize their autonomy to avoid significant dependency on them and tend to reduce, as much as possible, any relationship with them. believe that what these stories offer is a possibility, a possibility that already exists in real life. A possibility of organising lives beyond capitalist modernity. A possibility that is acutely threatened but also actively looked for. The Covid pandemic exposed the deep fault lines of the dominant systems. While the immediate humanitarian crisis was visible and generated widespread spontaneous initiatives by civil society and by several governments to provide relief, much less common were attempts to address root structural causes. It is vital that we accelerate this opportunity to simultaneously rethink the economic, social, political, cultural and ecological approaches to life. We need to urgently find alternative pathways of well-being that help generate dignified livelihoods for all and that help us move towards rebuilding our ecological relationship with and within nature.

Our earlier two volumes showed how communities across the world in the most desperate situations responded to the crises with resilience, care, innovation, and adaptability.

This volume brings stories of communities resisting and building transformative alternatives in conflict regions, war zones, exploitation, suppression and violence, all manifested in varied forms. Our first story from Palestine brings the struggle of organising and resisting in one of the world's most conflict ridden regions and describes "Beautiful Resistance," which uses culture, art, and education to resist injustice, oppression, and occupation. Our next story is from Ukraine - while at the time of writing of this editorial, it has been 480 days of war and invasion, there have been regional feminist responses to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Download it

Here you can download the PDF version of the report

We at Global Tapestry of Alternatives believe that what these stories offer is a possibility, a possibility that already exists in real life. A possibility of organising lives beyond capitalist modernity. A possibility that is acutely threatened but also actively looked for.

They are building on humanitarian and human rights crises, as well as crises of democracy, economy, care, and future visioning beyond survival. Another story is of how communities in Balkans and in Europe are resisting and organising to stop military plans and insist on developing a positive alternative for their territory- Sinjajevina (Montenegro)- one of the largest communal pasturelands of the continent.

Our next story comes from the Philippines, highlighting the resilience and regeneration of Sitio San Roque urban poor community, currently home to more than 6,000 families. The story brings out the power of community-led initiatives when solidarity and collective action are put into practice by marginalize peoples, especially when these are met with recognition and support from the government. Another story comes from one of the most violent cities in the world, São Paulo in Brazil. It tells about an experimental collective space UniDiversidade that nurtures local wisdom and practices for the development of young people, helps foster livelihood opportunities for them, and strengthens community bonds and collectivisation through art. Similarly, in Thailand, communities are resisting the destruction of their traditional livelihoods by creating systems of forest management & biodiversity by reviving traditional ways of farming.

Our last story comes from West Africa, where communities in Benin by protecting their sacred forests, reviving traditional practices of conviviality, and tending to land are combating results of systemic crises such as food insecurity, loss of forests, loss of livelihoods, and climate change.

These resistances and alternatives are emerging under grave threats by authoritarian states, corporations and other destructive processes unleashed by neoliberal, growth-at-all-costs "development", and continuing forms of patriarchy, racism, and colonialism. It is not easy for these movements to survive, let alone thrive. However, what we also see is the resurgence of life, and acts of solidarity, cooperation, love, autonomy, and care in all these examples. This spirit circulates among many grassroots expressions of collectives and networks, as dignified rage against systems of oppression as well as the affirmation of their resolve to defend their dignity by articulating a pluriverse of alternatives.

These stories located in varied contexts have commonalities. It is in their shared resistance to mainstream forces and policies that these initiatives can be called "alternatives" (though many in their own traditional contexts would be part of everyday life). These movements are based on a foundation of values and ethics, including solidarity, interconnectedness, cooperation, diversity and pluralism, autonomy, rights with responsibilities, mutual respect, equality, non-violence, and peace.

Storytelling is an important act of decolonization and disrupting the dominant stuck systems. With this hope, we share these stories, realising that it is important to read, share, and learn from them. It is crucial in these times that we constructively challenge each other, offer active solidarity whenever needed, interweave the initiatives in common actions, and support the conditions for the radical systemic changes we need. More than ever, we need to work together and stand in solidarity with each other's resistances and re-constructions.

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Volume 1: "Stories of Regeneration and Resilience"

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Volume 1: "Stories of Regeneration and Resilience" Introduction "People who are resisting as an everyday act of resistance against injustice, oppression, patriarchy, occupation, is a beautiful act of humanity" says Dr. Abdelfattah Abusrour from Palestine.alternativesTapestryAlternativesalternativesalternativesalternatives

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Land as teacher: understanding Indigenous land-based education

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What is Indigenous land-based education and what is it not? Four Indigenous voices from across the country share their insights on what it means to them, why it’s important for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous Peoples, and how it can support reconciliation efforts in Canada.

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FROM FARM-WORK TO CARE-WORK – Common Ecologies

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This is the introductory text to “Del Campo a los Cuidados. El Feminismo Sindicalista y Antiracista que viene”, published by the La Laboratoria feminist research network, with support of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation Madrid and Foundation for Arts Initiatives. It was translated into English for Common Ecologies and the MovE research project, by Maggie Schmitt from Zenobia translations. Illustrations by Cynthia Veneno (Instagram: @cynthiaveneno) Full Spanish Book: http://laboratoria.red/publicacion/del-campo-a-los-cuidados/

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FROM FARM-WORK TO CARE-WORK – Common Ecologies

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The old unionist machinery is worn out. The realities that gave rise to it have faded: there is no such thing now as a job for life, a factory in which to gather, a single boss to confront together. For many, the boss is now a digital platform or an application. Work is organized by campaign or by season, and next year you don’t work in the same place or with the same people. Many can’t distinguish where work ends and life begins, because the time dedicated to work is perpetual and we must be available around the clock to respond to an email, a call, or a sick person requesting a glass of water in the middle of the night.

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A necessary intervention ... to go beyond the experiential and into the experimental.'
- LSE Review of Books

'A balm that soothes the soul and eases the heart ... an open invitation through the portal ... into the otherwise.'
- Gail Lewis, co-founder of the Organisation for Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD)

'Reading this book wrought magic in my spirit. I am floored! I am flying! ... Here is some breath-giving medicine for this gasping historic moment. Here are some weapons for lovers, for feminists.'
- Sophie Lewis, author of Abolish the Family and Full Surrogacy Now

'Reminds us once more: the light is within us!'
- Imani Robinson, writer and curator

'I was blown away ... It's rare to come across a voice so committed to challenging every convention ... with such generosity, clarity and freshness of tone.'
- Preti Taneja, author of Aftermath and We That Are Young
Press EXTRACT: Wandering Concepts
- Kunsthalle Bratislava, August 2023
REVIEW: Laying Out a Space
- Review 31, 19 October 2022
What to Read When the World Feels Hopeless
- Book Riot, 15 September 2022
Edinburgh International Book Festival: Week two recap
- The Skinny, 30 August 2022
Lola Olufemi on Experiments in Imagining Otherwise
- The Skinny, 11 August 2022
REVIEW: Experiments in Imagining Otherwise by Lola Olufemi
- LSE Review of Books, 15 July 2022
EXTRACT: Do Nothing, Feel Everything
- Kunsthalle Bratislava, July 2022
What Form Does Queerness Take? With Lola Olufemi, Nat Raha and Pear Nuallak
- Bad Form, 30 June 2022
What we're reading: writers and readers on the books they enjoyed in March
- The Guardian, 5 April 2022
EXTRACT: Everyday atrocity
- Decolonising Geography, 30 March 2022
PODCAST: Lola Olufemi: The Radical Power of Imagination
- Tender Buttons, 28 March 2022
In Conversation with Lola Olufemi
- TANK, Issue 90, Spring 2022
Wasafiri Wonders: Lola Olufemi
- Wasafiri, 25 February 2022
REVIEW: This Book Made Me Feel Less Alone
- Bad Form, 18 February 2022
REVIEW: Experiments in Imagining Otherwise
- Totally Dublin, 11 January 2022
What was on gal-dem's 2021 bookshelf?
- gal-dem, 30 December 2021
The best books of 2021
- Red Pepper, 18 December 2021
SPAM DEEP CUTS 2021
- SPAM, 15 December 2021
REVIEW: Experiments in Imagining Otherwise
- periodicities : a journal of poetry and poetics, 4 December 2021
Books of the Year
- The New Statesman, 17 November 2021
EXTRACT: Red by Lola Olufemi
- Wasafiri, 24 May 2021
< Back to Books

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Experiments in Imagining Otherwise by Lola Olufemi - Hajar Press

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We collectively build and collectively shatter-every broken window is a new opportunity; every burnt ember is construction material.

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This collectively made book is a compendium of tactics and tools for agreocological transition, gleaned from different struggles at the forefront of socio-ecological change in Europe. It presents 13 broad tactical approaches and 5 legal-organizational models for transformation and justice in the world of agriculture and beyond, as well as plenty of tools. Knowing that within and beyond agriculture there are ecological, feminist and anti-racist struggles, this book documents how fighting for agroecology also means pushing for land and labour rights, for commons and cooperativism, community and territorial power, climate justice, translocal and transversal solidarity, and direct democracy – and against the privatizing, extractive and ecocidal model of agroindustry.

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Description

A synthesis of more than three decades of interdisciplinary research and practice, Agroecology and Regenerative Agriculture: Sustainable Solutions for Hunger, Poverty, and Climate Change, provides evidence-based solutions to some of the world's most pressing crises in global ecology, agriculture and public health.

Featuring the work of Navdanya, an organization founded by Dr. Vandana Shiva that promotes agroecology, seed freedom, and a vision of Earth Democracy that seeks justice for the Earth and all living beings, this work serves as a guidebook for agriculture scientists, policy makers, environmentalists and every individual who cares about their own health as well as the vitality of the planet.

Agroecology and Regenerative Agriculture, provides a detailed analysis of the multiple planetary dilemmas we face due to chemical and industrial agriculture, including land degradation, water depletion, biodiversity erosion, climate change, agrarian crises, and health crises while also focusing on practical and evidence-based solutions.

Those solutions include methods of using biodiversity-based organic farming to regenerate soil, conserve water, increase climate change resilience, and ensure food security in rural populations. As editor, Dr. Shiva takes an organized approach to these wide-ranging topics and provides practical knowledge that can inform the future of agriculture and sustainable food systems. With detailed scientific evidence, Agroecology and Regenerative Agriculture shows how an ecological agriculture based on working with nature can regenerate the planet, the rural economy and our health.

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Agroecology and Regenerative Agriculture: Sustainable Solutions for Hunger, Poverty, and Climate Change

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Agroecology and Regenerative Agriculture provides solutions to some of the world's most pressing crises in global ecology and agriculture.

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This is where it all began. A self-published pamphlet, born out of two years of conversations, crowdfunded over the internet, launched at a small riverside gathering outside Oxford in summer 2009.

Written by Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine, it marked a first attempt to put into words the ideas and feelings which led to Dark Mountain. Think of it as a flag raised so that we can find one another. A point of departure, rather than a party line. An invitation to a larger conversation that continues to take us down unexpected paths.

You can read the full text of the manifesto here - or order the paperback edition, which includes an essay from Dougald, reflecting on the first five years of Dark Mountain. The manifesto has been translated and published in Czech and Finnish, while draft translations exist in many other languages.

THE DARK MOUNTAIN MANIFESTO

Rearmament

These grand and fatal movements toward death: the grandeur of the mass
Makes pity a fool, the tearing pity
For the atoms of the mass, the persons, the victims, makes it seem monstrous
To admire the tragic beauty they build.
It is beautiful as a river flowing or a slowly gathering
Glacier on a high mountain rock-face,
Bound to plow down a forest, or as frost in November,
The gold and flaming death-dance for leaves,
Or a girl in the night of her spent maidenhood, bleeding and kissing.
I would burn my right hand in a slow fire
To change the future ... I should do foolishly. The beauty of modern
Man is not in the persons but in the
Disastrous rhythm, the heavy and mobile masses, the dance of the
Dream-led masses down the dark mountain.

I

WALKING ON LAVA

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilisation.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Those who witness extreme social collapse at first hand seldom describe any deep revelation about the truths of human existence. What they do mention, if asked, is their surprise at how easy it is to die.

The pattern of ordinary life, in which so much stays the same from one day to the next, disguises the fragility of its fabric. How many of our activities are made possible by the impression of stability that pattern gives? So long as it repeats, or varies steadily enough, we are able to plan for tomorrow as if all the things we rely on and don't think about too carefully will still be there. When the pattern is broken, by civil war or natural disaster or the smaller-scale tragedies that tear at its fabric, many of those activities become impossible or meaningless, while simply meeting needs we once took for granted may occupy much of our lives.

What war correspondents and relief workers report is not only the fragility of the fabric, but the speed with which it can unravel. As we write this, no one can say with certainty where the unravelling of the financial and commercial fabric of our economies will end. Meanwhile, beyond the cities, unchecked industrial exploitation frays the material basis of life in many parts of the world, and pulls at the ecological systems which sustain it.

Precarious as this moment may be, however, an awareness of the fragility of what we call civilisation is nothing new.

'Few men realise,' wrote Joseph Conrad in 1896, 'that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings.' Conrad's writings exposed the civilisation exported by European imperialists to be little more than a comforting illusion, not only in the dark, unconquerable heart of Africa, but in the whited sepulchres of their capital cities. The inhabitants of that civilisation believed 'blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and its morals, in the power of its police and of its opinion,' but their confidence could be maintained only by the seeming solidity of the crowd of like-minded believers surrounding them. Outside the walls, the wild remained as close to the surface as blood under skin, though the city-dweller was no longer equipped to face it directly.

Bertrand Russell caught this vein in Conrad's worldview, suggesting that the novelist 'thought of civilised and morally tolerable human life as a dangerous walk on a thin crust of barely cooled lava which at any moment might break and let the unwary sink into fiery depths.' What both Russell and Conrad were getting at was a simple fact which any historian could confirm: human civilisation is an intensely fragile construction. It is built on little more than belief: belief in the rightness of its values; belief in the strength of its system of law and order; belief in its currency; above all, perhaps, belief in its future.

Once that belief begins to crumble, the collapse of a civilisation may become unstoppable. That civilisations fall, sooner or later, is as much a law of history as gravity is a law of physics. What remains after the fall is a wild mixture of cultural debris, confused and angry people whose certainties have betrayed them, and those forces which were always there, deeper than the foundations of the city walls: the desire to survive and the desire for meaning.

*

It is, it seems, our civilisation's turn to experience the inrush of the savage and the unseen; our turn to be brought up short by contact with untamed reality. There is a fall coming. We live in an age in which familiar restraints are being kicked away, and foundations snatched from under us. After a quarter century of complacency, in which we were invited to believe in bubbles that would never burst, prices that would never fall, the end of history, the crude repackaging of the triumphalism of Conrad's Victorian twilight - Hubris has been introduced to Nemesis. Now a familiar human story is being played out. It is the story of an empire corroding from within. It is the story of a people who believed, for a long time, that their actions did not have consequences. It is the story of how that people will cope with the crumbling of their own myth. It is our story.

This time, the crumbling empire is the unassailable global economy, and the brave new world of consumer democracy being forged worldwide in its name. Upon the indestructibility of this edifice we have pinned the hopes of this latest phase of our civilisation. Now, its failure and fallibility exposed, the world's elites are scrabbling frantically to buoy up an economic machine which, for decades, they told us needed little restraint, for restraint would be its undoing. Uncountable sums of money are being funnelled upwards in order to prevent an uncontrolled explosion. The machine is stuttering and the engineers are in panic. They are wondering if perhaps they do not understand it as well as they imagined. They are wondering whether they are controlling it at all or whether, perhaps, it is controlling them.

Increasingly, people are restless. The engineers group themselves into competing teams, but neither side seems to know what to do, and neither seems much different from the other. Around the world, discontent can be heard. The extremists are grinding their knives and moving in as the machine's coughing and stuttering exposes the inadequacies of the political oligarchies who claimed to have everything in hand. Old gods are rearing their heads, and old answers: revolution, war, ethnic strife. Politics as we have known it totters, like the machine it was built to sustain. In its place could easily arise something more elemental, with a dark heart.

As the financial wizards lose their powers of levitation, as the politicians and economists struggle to conjure new explanations, it starts to dawn on us that behind the curtain, at the heart of the Emerald City, sits not the benign and omnipotent invisible hand we had been promised, but something else entirely. Something responsible for what Marx, writing not so long before Conrad, cast as the 'everlasting uncertainty and anguish' of the 'bourgeois epoch'; a time in which 'all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Draw back the curtain, follow the tireless motion of cogs and wheels back to its source, and you will find the engine driving our civilisation: the myth of progress.

The myth of progress is to us what the myth of god-given warrior prowess was to the Romans, or the myth of eternal salvation was to the conquistadors: without it, our efforts cannot be sustained. Onto the root stock of Western Christianity, the Enlightenment at its most optimistic grafted a vision of an Earthly paradise, towards which human effort guided by calculative reason could take us. Following this guidance, each generation will live a better life than the life of those that went before it. History becomes an escalator, and the only way is up. On the top floor is human perfection. It is important that this should remain just out of reach in order to sustain the sensation of motion.

Recent history, however, has given this mechanism something of a battering. The past century too often threatened a descent into hell, rather than the promised heaven on Earth. Even within the prosperous and liberal societies of the West progress has, in many ways, failed to deliver the goods. Today's generation are demonstrably less content, and consequently less optimistic, than those that went before. They work longer hours, with less security, and less chance of leaving behind the social background into which they were born. They fear crime, social breakdown, overdevelopment, environmental collapse. They do not believe that the future will be better than the past. Individually, they are less constrained by class and convention than their parents or grandparents, but more constrained by law, surveillance, state proscription and personal debt. Their physical health is better, their mental health more fragile. Nobody knows what is coming. Nobody wants to look.

Most significantly of all, there is an underlying darkness at the root of everything we have built. Outside the cities, beyond the blurring edges of our civilisation, at the mercy of the machine but not under its control, lies something that neither Marx nor Conrad, Caesar nor Hume, Thatcher nor Lenin ever really understood. Something that Western civilisation - which has set the terms for global civilisation-was never capable of understanding, because to understand it would be to undermine, fatally, the myth of that civilisation. Something upon which that thin crust of lava is balanced; which feeds the machine and all the people who run it, and which they have all trained themselves not to see.

II

THE SEVERED HAND

Then what is the answer? Not to be deluded by dreams.
To know that great civilisations have broken down into violence,
and their tyrants come, many times before.
When open violence appears, to avoid it with honor or choose
the least ugly faction; these evils are essential.
To keep one's own integrity, be merciful and uncorrupted
and not wish for evil; and not be duped
By dreams of universal justice or happiness. These dreams will
not be fulfilled.
To know this, and know that however ugly the parts appear
the whole remains beautiful. A severed hand
Is an ugly thing and man dissevered from the earth and stars
and his history ... for contemplation or in fact ...
Often appears atrociously ugly. Integrity is wholeness,
the greatest beauty is
Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty
of the universe. Love that, not man
Apart from that, or else you will share man's pitiful confusions,
or drown in despair when his days darken.
Robinson Jeffers, 'The Answer'

The myth of progress is founded on the myth of nature. The first tells us that we are destined for greatness; the second tells us that greatness is cost-free. Each is intimately bound up with the other. Both tell us that we are apart from the world; that we began grunting in the primeval swamps, as a humble part of something called 'nature', which we have now triumphantly subdued. The very fact that we have a word for 'nature' is evidence that we do not regard ourselves as part of it. Indeed, our separation from it is a myth integral to the triumph of our civilisation. We are, we tell ourselves, the only species ever to have attacked nature and won. In this, our unique glory is contained.

Outside the citadels of self-congratulation, lone voices have cried out against this infantile version of the human story for centuries, but it is only in the last few decades that its inaccuracy has become laughably apparent. We are the first generations to grow up surrounded by evidence that our attempt to separate ourselves from 'nature' has been a grim failure, proof not of our genius but our hubris. The attempt to sever the hand from the body has endangered the 'progress' we hold so dear, and it has endangered much of 'nature' too. The resulting upheaval underlies the crisis we now face.

We imagined ourselves isolated from the source of our existence. The fallout from this imaginative error is all around us: a quarter of the world's mammals are threatened with imminent extinction; an acre and a half of rainforest is felled every second; 75% of the world's fish stocks are on the verge of collapse; humanity consumes 25% more of the world's natural 'products' than the Earth can replace - a figure predicted to rise to 80% by mid-century. Even through the deadening lens of statistics, we can glimpse the violence to which our myths have driven us.

And over it all looms runaway climate change. Climate change, which threatens to render all human projects irrelevant; which presents us with detailed evidence of our lack of understanding of the world we inhabit while, at the same time, demonstrating that we are still entirely reliant upon it. Climate change, which highlights in painful colour the head-on crash between civilisation and 'nature'; which makes plain, more effectively than any carefully constructed argument or optimistically defiant protest, how the machine's need for permanent growth will require us to destroy ourselves in its name. Climate change, which brings home at last our ultimate powerlessness.

These are the facts, or some of them. Yet facts never tell the whole story. ('Facts', Conrad wrote, in Lord Jim, 'as if facts could prove anything.') The facts of environmental crisis we hear so much about often conceal as much as they expose. We hear daily about the impacts of our activities on 'the environment' (like 'nature', this is an expression which distances us from the reality of our situation). Daily we hear, too, of the many 'solutions' to these problems: solutions which usually involve the necessity of urgent political agreement and a judicious application of human technological genius. Things may be changing, runs the narrative, but there is nothing we cannot deal with here, folks. We perhaps need to move faster, more urgently. Certainly we need to accelerate the pace of research and development. We accept that we must become more 'sustainable'. But everything will be fine. There will still be growth, there will still be progress: these things will continue, because they have to continue, so they cannot do anything but continue. There is nothing to see here. Everything will be fine.

*

We do not believe that everything will be fine. We are not even sure, based on current definitions of progress and improvement, that we want it to be. Of all humanity's delusions of difference, of its separation from and superiority to the living world which surrounds it, one distinction holds up better than most: we may well be the first species capable of effectively eliminating life on Earth. This is a hypothesis we seem intent on putting to the test. We are already responsible for denuding the world of much of its richness, magnificence, beauty, colour and magic, and we show no sign of slowing down. For a very long time, we imagined that 'nature' was something that happened elsewhere. The damage we did to it might be regrettable, but needed to be weighed against the benefits here and now. And in the worst case scenario, there would always be some kind of Plan B. Perhaps we would make for the moon, where we could survive in lunar colonies under giant bubbles as we planned our expansion across the galaxy.

But there is no Plan B and the bubble, it turns out, is where we have been living all the while. The bubble is that delusion of isolation under which we have laboured for so long. The bubble has cut us off from life on the only planet we have, or are ever likely to have. The bubble is civilisation.

Consider the structures on which that bubble has been built. Its foundations are geological: coal, oil, gas - millions upon millions of years of ancient sunlight, dragged from the depths of the planet and burned with abandon. On this base, the structure stands. Move upwards, and you pass through a jumble of supporting horrors: battery chicken sheds; industrial abattoirs; burning forests; beam-trawled ocean floors; dynamited reefs; hollowed-out mountains; wasted soil. Finally, on top of all these unseen layers, you reach the well-tended surface where you and I stand: unaware, or uninterested, in what goes on beneath us; demanding that the authorities keep us in the manner to which we have been accustomed; occasionally feeling twinges of guilt that lead us to buy organic chickens or locally-produced lettuces; yet for the most part glutted, but not sated, on the fruits of the horrors on which our lifestyles depend.

We are the first generations born into a new and unprecedented age - the age of ecocide. To name it thus is not to presume the outcome, but simply to describe a process which is underway. The ground, the sea, the air, the elemental backdrops to our existence - all these our economics has taken for granted, to be used as a bottomless tip, endlessly able to dilute and disperse the tailings of our extraction, production, consumption. The sheer scale of the sky or the weight of a swollen river makes it hard to imagine that creatures as flimsy as you and I could do that much damage. Philip Larkin gave voice to this attitude, and the creeping, worrying end of it in his poem Going, Going:

Things are tougher than we are, just
As earth will always respond
However we mess it about;
Chuck filth in the sea, if you must:
The tides will be clean beyond.
- But what do I feel now? Doubt?

Nearly forty years on from Larkin's words, doubt is what all of us seem to feel, all of the time. Too much filth has been chucked in the sea and into the soil and into the atmosphere to make any other feeling sensible. The doubt, and the facts, have paved the way for a worldwide movement of environmental politics, which aimed, at least in its early, raw form, to challenge the myths of development and progress head-on. But time has not been kind to the greens. Today's environmentalists are more likely to be found at corporate conferences hymning the virtues of 'sustainability' and 'ethical consumption' than doing anything as naive as questioning the intrinsic values of civilisation. Capitalism has absorbed the greens, as it absorbs so many challenges to its ascendancy. A radical challenge to the human machine has been transformed into yet another opportunity for shopping.

'Denial' is a hot word, heavy with connotations. When it is used to brand the remaining rump of climate change sceptics, they object noisily to the association with those who would rewrite the history of the Holocaust. Yet the focus on this dwindling group may serve as a distraction from a far larger form of denial, in its psychoanalytic sense. Freud wrote of the inability of people to hear things which did not fit with the way they saw themselves and the world. We put ourselves through all kinds of inner contortions, rather than look plainly at those things which challenge our fundamental understanding of the world.

Today, humanity is up to its neck in denial about what it has built, what it has become - and what it is in for. Ecological and economic collapse unfold before us and, if we acknowledge them at all, we act as if this were a temporary problem, a technical glitch. Centuries of hubris block our ears like wax plugs; we cannot hear the message which reality is screaming at us. For all our doubts and discontents, we are still wired to an idea of history in which the future will be an upgraded version of the present. The assumption remains that things must continue in their current direction: the sense of crisis only smudges the meaning of that 'must'. No longer a natural inevitability, it becomes an urgent necessity: we must find a way to go on having supermarkets and superhighways. We cannot contemplate the alternative.

And so we find ourselves, all of us together, poised trembling on the edge of a change so massive that we have no way of gauging it. None of us knows where to look, but all of us know not to look down. Secretly, we all think we are doomed: even the politicians think this; even the environmentalists. Some of us deal with it by going shopping. Some deal with it by hoping it is true. Some give up in despair. Some work frantically to try and fend off the coming storm.

Our question is: what would happen if we looked down? Would it be as bad as we imagine? What might we see? Could it even be good for us?

We believe it is time to look down.

III

UNCIVILISATION

Without mystery, without curiosity and without the form imposed by a partial answer, there can be no stories-only confessions, communiqués, memories and fragments of autobiographical fantasy which for the moment pass as novels.
John Berger, 'A Story for Aesop', from Keeping a Rendezvous
If we are indeed teetering on the edge of a massive change in how we live, in how human society itself is constructed, and in how we relate to the rest of the world, then we were led to this point by the stories we have told ourselves - above all, by the story of civilisation.

This story has many variants, religious and secular, scientific, economic and mystic. But all tell of humanity's original transcendence of its animal beginnings, our growing mastery over a 'nature' to which we no longer belong, and the glorious future of plenty and prosperity which will follow when this mastery is complete. It is the story of human centrality, of a species destined to be lord of all it surveys, unconfined by the limits that apply to other, lesser creatures.

What makes this story so dangerous is that, for the most part, we have forgotten that it is a story. It has been told so many times by those who see themselves as rationalists, even scientists; heirs to the Enlightenment's legacy - a legacy which includes the denial of the role of stories in making the world.

Humans have always lived by stories, and those with skill in telling them have been treated with respect and, often, a certain wariness. Beyond the limits of reason, reality remains mysterious, as incapable of being approached directly as a hunter's quarry. With stories, with art, with symbols and layers of meaning, we stalk those elusive aspects of reality that go undreamed of in our philosophy. The storyteller weaves the mysterious into the fabric of life, lacing it with the comic, the tragic, the obscene, making safe paths through dangerous territory.

Yet as the myth of civilisation deepened its grip on our thinking, borrowing the guise of science and reason, we began to deny the role of stories, to dismiss their power as something primitive, childish, outgrown. The old tales by which generations had made sense of life's subtleties and strangenesses were bowdlerised and packed off to the nursery. Religion, that bag of myths and mysteries, birthplace of the theatre, was straightened out into a framework of universal laws and moral account-keeping. The dream visions of the Middle Ages became the nonsense stories of Victorian childhood. In the age of the novel, stories were no longer the way to approach the deep truths of the world, so much as a way to pass time on a train journey. It is hard, today, to imagine that the word of a poet was once feared by a king.

Yet for all this, our world is still shaped by stories. Through television, film, novels and video games, we may be more thoroughly bombarded with narrative material than any people that ever lived. What is peculiar, however, is the carelessness with which these stories are channelled at us - as entertainment, a distraction from daily life, something to hold our attention to the other side of the ad break. There is little sense that these things make up the equipment by which we navigate reality. On the other hand, there are the serious stories told by economists, politicians, geneticists and corporate leaders. These are not presented as stories at all, but as direct accounts of how the world is. Choose between competing versions, then fight with those who chose differently. The ensuing conflicts play out on early morning radio, in afternoon debates and late night television pundit wars. And yet, for all the noise, what is striking is how much the opposing sides agree on: all their stories are only variants of the larger story of human centrality, of our ever-expanding control over 'nature', our right to perpetual economic growth, our ability to transcend all limits.

So we find ourselves, our ways of telling unbalanced, trapped inside a runaway narrative, headed for the worst kind of encounter with reality. In such a moment, writers, artists, poets and storytellers of all kinds have a critical role to play. Creativity remains the most uncontrollable of human forces: without it, the project of civilisation is inconceivable, yet no part of life remains so untamed and undomesticated. Words and images can change minds, hearts, even the course of history. Their makers shape the stories people carry through their lives, unearth old ones and breathe them back to life, add new twists, point to unexpected endings. It is time to pick up the threads and make the stories new, as they must always be made new, starting from where we are.

Mainstream art in the West has long been about shock; about busting taboos, about Getting Noticed. This has gone on for so long that it has become common to assert that in these ironic, exhausted, post-everything times, there are no taboos left to bust. But there is one.

The last taboo is the myth of civilisation. It is built upon the stories we have constructed about our genius, our indestructibility, our manifest destiny as a chosen species. It is where our vision and our self-belief intertwine with our reckless refusal to face the reality of our position on this Earth. It has led the human race to achieve what it has achieved; and has led the planet into the age of ecocide. The two are intimately linked. We believe they must be decoupled if anything is to remain.

We believe that artists - which is to us the most welcoming of words, taking under its wing writers of all kinds, painters, musicians, sculptors, poets, designers, creators, makers of things, dreamers of dreams - have a responsibility to begin the process of decoupling. We believe that, in the age of ecocide, the last taboo must be broken - and that only artists can do it.

Ecocide demands a response. That response is too important to be left to politicians, economists, conceptual thinkers, number crunchers; too all-pervasive to be left to activists or campaigners. Artists are needed. So far, though, the artistic response has been muted. In between traditional nature poetry and agitprop, what is there? Where are the poems that have adjusted their scope to the scale of this challenge? Where are the novels that probe beyond the country house or the city centre? What new form of writing has emerged to challenge civilisation itself? What gallery mounts an exhibition equal to this challenge? Which musician has discovered the secret chord?

If the answers to these questions have been scarce up to now, it is perhaps both because the depth of collective denial is so great, and because the challenge is so very daunting. We are daunted by it, ourselves. But we believe it needs to be risen to. We believe that art must look over the edge, face the world that is coming with a steady eye, and rise to the challenge of ecocide with a challenge of its own: an artistic response to the crumbling of the empires of the mind.

*

This response we call Uncivilised art, and we are interested in one branch of it in particular: Uncivilised writing. Uncivilised writing is writing which attempts to stand outside the human bubble and see us as we are: highly evolved apes with an array of talents and abilities which we are unleashing without sufficient thought, control, compassion or intelligence. Apes who have constructed a sophisticated myth of their own importance with which to sustain their civilising project. Apes whose project has been to tame, to control, to subdue or to destroy - to civilise the forests, the deserts, the wild lands and the seas, to impose bonds on the minds of their own in order that they might feel nothing when they exploit or destroy their fellow creatures.

Against the civilising project, which has become the progenitor of ecocide, Uncivilised writing offers not a non-human perspective-we remain human and, even now, are not quite ashamed - but a perspective which sees us as one strand of a web rather than as the first palanquin in a glorious procession. It offers an unblinking look at the forces among which we find ourselves.

It sets out to paint a picture of homo sapiens which a being from another world or, better, a being from our own - a blue whale, an albatross, a mountain hare - might recognise as something approaching a truth. It sets out to tug our attention away from ourselves and turn it outwards; to uncentre our minds. It is writing, in short, which puts civilisation - and us - into perspective. Writing that comes not, as most writing still does, from the self-absorbed and self-congratulatory metropolitan centres of civilisation but from somewhere on its wilder fringes. Somewhere woody and weedy and largely avoided, from where insistent, uncomfortable truths about ourselves drift in; truths which we're not keen on hearing. Writing which unflinchingly stares us down, however uncomfortable this may prove.

It might perhaps be just as useful to explain what Uncivilised writing is not. It is not environmental writing, for there is much of that about already, and most of it fails to jump the barrier which marks the limit of our collective human ego; much of it, indeed, ends up shoring-up that ego, and helping us to persist in our civilisational delusions. It is not nature writing, for there is no such thing as nature as distinct from people, and to suggest otherwise is to perpetuate the attitude which has brought us here. And it is not political writing, with which the world is already flooded, for politics is a human confection, complicit in ecocide and decaying from within.

Uncivilised writing is more rooted than any of these. Above all, it is determined to shift our worldview, not to feed into it. It is writing for outsiders. If you want to be loved, it might be best not to get involved, for the world, at least for a time, will resolutely refuse to listen.

A salutary example of this last point can be found in the fate of one of the twentieth century's most significant yet most neglected poets. Robinson Jeffers was writing Uncivilised verse seventy years before this manifesto was thought of, though he did not call it that. In his early poetic career, Jeffers was a star: he appeared on the cover of Time magazine, read his poems in the US Library of Congress and was respected for the alternative he offered to the Modernist juggernaut. Today his work is left out of anthologies, his name is barely known and his politics are regarded with suspicion. Read Jeffers' later work and you will see why. His crime was to deliberately puncture humanity's sense of self-importance. His punishment was to be sent into a lonely literary exile from which, forty years after his death, he has still not been allowed to return.

But Jeffers knew what he was in for. He knew that nobody, in an age of 'consumer choice', wanted to be told by this stone-faced prophet of the California cliffs that 'it is good for man ... To know that his needs and nature are no more changed in fact in ten thousand years than the beaks of eagles.' He knew that no comfortable liberal wanted to hear his angry warning, issued at the height of the Second World War: 'Keep clear of the dupes that talk democracy / And the dogs that talk revolution / Drunk with talk, liars and believers ... / Long live freedom, and damn the ideologies.' His vision of a world in which humanity was doomed to destroy its surroundings and eventually itself ('I would burn my right hand in a slow fire / To change the future ... I should do foolishly') was furiously rejected in the rising age of consumer democracy which he also predicted ('Be happy, adjust your economics to the new abundance...')

Jeffers, as his poetry developed, developed a philosophy too. He called it 'inhumanism.' It was, he wrote:

a shifting of emphasis and significance from man to notman; the rejection of human solipsism and recognition of the transhuman magnificence...This manner of thought and feeling is neither misanthropic nor pessimist ... It offers a reasonable detachment as rule of conduct, instead of love, hate and envy... it provides magnificence for the religious instinct, and satisfies our need to admire greatness and rejoice in beauty.

The shifting of emphasis from man to notman: this is the aim of Uncivilised writing. To 'unhumanise our views a little, and become confident / As the rock and ocean that we were made from.' This is not a rejection of our humanity - it is an affirmation of the wonder of what it means to be truly human. It is to accept the world for what it is and to make our home here, rather than dreaming of relocating to the stars, or existing in a Man-forged bubble and pretending to ourselves that there is nothing outside it to which we have any connection at all.

This, then, is the literary challenge of our age. So far, few have taken it up. The signs of the times flash out in urgent neon, but our literary lions have better things to read. Their art remains stuck in its own civilised bubble. The idea of civilisation is entangled, right down to its semantic roots, with city-dwelling, and this provokes a thought: if our writers seem unable to find new stories which might lead us through the times ahead, is this not a function of their metropolitan mentality? The big names of contemporary literature are equally at home in the fashionable quarters of London or New York, and their writing reflects the prejudices of the placeless, transnational elite to which they belong.

The converse also applies. Those voices which tell other stories tend to be rooted in a sense of place. Think of John Berger's novels and essays from the Haute Savoie, or the depths explored by Alan Garner within a day's walk of his birthplace in Cheshire. Think of Wendell Berry or WS Merwin, Mary Oliver or Cormac McCarthy. Those whose writings approach the shores of the Uncivilised are those who know their place, in the physical sense, and who remain wary of the siren cries of metrovincial fashion and civilised excitement.

If we name particular writers whose work embodies what we are arguing for, the aim is not to place them more prominently on the existing map of literary reputations. Rather, as Geoff Dyer has said of Berger, to take their work seriously is to redraw the maps altogether - not only the map of literary reputations, but those by which we navigate all areas of life.

Even here, we go carefully, for cartography itself is not a neutral activity. The drawing of maps is full of colonial echoes. The civilised eye seeks to view the world from above, as something we can stand over and survey. The Uncivilised writer knows the world is, rather, something we are enmeshed in - a patchwork and a framework of places, experiences, sights, smells, sounds. Maps can lead, but can also mislead. Our maps must be the kind sketched in the dust with a stick, washed away by the next rain. They can be read only by those who ask to see them, and they cannot be bought.

This, then, is Uncivilised writing. Human, inhuman, stoic and entirely natural. Humble, questioning, suspicious of the big idea and the easy answer. Walking the boundaries and reopening old conversations. Apart but engaged, its practitioners always willing to get their hands dirty; aware, in fact, that dirt is essential; that keyboards should be tapped by those with soil under their fingernails and wilderness in their heads.

We tried ruling the world; we tried acting as God's steward, then we tried ushering in the human revolution, the age of reason and isolation. We failed in all of it, and our failure destroyed more than we were even aware of. The time for civilisation is past. Uncivilisation, which knows its flaws because it has participated in them; which sees unflinchingly and bites down hard as it records - this is the project we must embark on now. This is the challenge for writing - for art - to meet. This is what we are here for.

IV

TO THE FOOTHILLS!

One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.
William Wordsworth, 'The Tables Turned'

A movement needs a beginning. An expedition needs a base camp. A project needs a headquarters. Uncivilisation is our project, and the promotion of Uncivilised writing - and art - needs a base. We present this manifesto not simply because we have something to say-who doesn't?-but because we have something to do. We hope this pamphlet has created a spark. If so, we have a responsibility to fan the flames. This is what we intend to do. But we can't do it alone.

This is a moment to ask deep questions and to ask them urgently. All around us, shifts are under way which suggest that our whole way of living is already passing into history. It is time to look for new paths and new stories, ones that can lead us through the end of the world as we know it and out the other side. We suspect that by questioning the foundations of civilisation, the myth of human centrality, our imagined isolation, we may find the beginning of such paths.

If we are right, it will be necessary to go literally beyond the Pale. Outside the stockades we have built - the city walls, the original marker in stone or wood that first separated 'man' from 'nature'. Beyond the gates, out into the wilderness, is where we are headed. And there we shall make for the higher ground for, as Jeffers wrote, 'when the cities lie at the monster's feet / There are left the mountains.' We shall make the pilgrimage to the poet's Dark Mountain, to the great, immovable, inhuman heights which were here before us and will be here after, and from their slopes we shall look back upon the pinprick lights of the distant cities and gain perspective on who we are and what we have become.

This is the Dark Mountain project. It starts here.

Where will it end? Nobody knows. Where will it lead? We are not sure. Its first incarnation, launched alongside this manifesto, is a website, which points the way to the ranges. It will contain thoughts, scribblings, jottings, ideas; it will work up the project of Uncivilisation, and invite all comers to join the discussion.

Then it will become a physical object, because virtual reality is, ultimately, no reality at all. It will become a journal, of paper, card, paint and print; of ideas, thoughts, observations, mumblings; new stories which will help to define the project - the school, the movement - of Uncivilised writing. It will collect the words and the images of those who consider themselves Uncivilised and have something to say about it; who want to help us attack the citadels. It will be a thing of beauty for the eye and for the heart and for the mind, for we are unfashionable enough to believe that beauty - like truth - not only exists, but still matters.

Beyond that ... all is currently hidden from view. It is a long way across the plains, and things become obscured by distance. There are great white spaces on this map still. The civilised would fill them in; we are not so sure we want to. But we cannot resist exploring them, navigating by rumours and by the stars. We don't know quite what we will find. We are slightly nervous. But we will not turn back, for we believe that something enormous may be out there, waiting to meet us.

Uncivilisation, like civilisation, is not something that can be created alone. Climbing the Dark Mountain cannot be a solitary exercise. We need bearers, sherpas, guides, fellow adventurers. We need to rope ourselves together for safety. At present, our form is loose and nebulous. It will firm itself up as we climb. Like the best writing, we need to be shaped by the ground beneath our feet, and what we become will be shaped, at least in part, by what we find on our journey.

If you would like to climb at least some of the way with us, we would like to hear from you. We feel sure there are others out there who would relish joining us on this expedition.

Come. Join us. We leave at dawn.

THE EIGHT PRINCIPLES OF UNCIVILISATION

'We must unhumanise our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.'

1. We live in a time of social, economic and ecological unravelling. All around us are signs that our whole way of living is already passing into history. We will face this reality honestly and learn how to live with it.

2. We reject the faith which holds that the converging crises of our times can be reduced to a set of 'problems' in need of technological or political 'solutions'.

3. We believe that the roots of these crises lie in the stories we have been telling ourselves. We intend to challenge the stories which underpin our civilisation: the myth of progress, the myth of human centrality, and the myth of our separation from 'nature'. These myths are more dangerous for the fact that we have forgotten they are myths.

4. We will reassert the role of storytelling as more than mere entertainment. It is through stories that we weave reality.

5. Humans are not the point and purpose of the planet. Our art will begin with the attempt to step outside the human bubble. By careful attention, we will reengage with the non-human world.

6. We will celebrate writing and art which is grounded in a sense of place and of time. Our literature has been dominated for too long by those who inhabit the cosmopolitan citadels.

7. We will not lose ourselves in the elaboration of theories or ideologies. Our words will be elemental. We write with dirt under our fingernails.

8. The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop. Together, we will find the hope beyond hope, the paths which lead to the unknown world ahead of us.

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This is where it all began. A self-published pamphlet, born out of two years of conversations, crowdfunded over the internet, launched at a small riverside gathering outside Oxford in summer 2009. Written by Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine, it marked a first attempt to put into words the ideas and feelings which led to Dark Mountain.

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Through essays, articles, poems, and stories, Nourishing Resistance argues that food is a central, intrinsic part of global struggles for autonomy and collective liberation.

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From the cooks who have quietly fed rebels and revolutionaries to the collective kitchens set up after hurricanes and floods, food has long played a crucial role in resistance, protest, and mutual aid. Until very recently, food-based work 'steadfast and not particularly flashy'slipped under the radar or was centered on celebrity chefs and well-funded nonprofits. Adding to a growing constellation of conversations that push against this narrative, Nourishing Resistance centers the role of everyday people in acts of culinary solidarity. Twenty-three contributors, "cooks, farmers, writers, organizers, academics, and dreamers", write on queer potlucks, BIPOC-centered farms and gardens, rebel ancestors, disability justice, indigenous food sovereignty, and the fight against toxic diet culture, among many other topics. They recount bowls of biryani at a Delhi protest, fricasé de conejo on a Puerto Rican farm, pay-as-you-want dishes in a collectively-run Hong Kong restaurant, and lemon cake cooked in a New Jersey disaster relief kitchen. They chronicle the communal kitchens and food distribution programs that emerged in Buenos Aires and New York City in the wake of COVID-19, which caused surging food insecurity worldwide. They look to the past, revealing how 'Bella Ciao' was composed by striking women rice workers, and the future, speculating on postcapitalist worlds that include both high-tech collective farms and herbs gathered beside highways. Through essays, articles, poems, and stories, Nourishing Resistance argues that food is a central, intrinsic part of global struggles for autonomy and collective liberation.

Subtitel: Stories of Food, Protest and Mutual Aid
Auteur: Awry, Wren & Cindy Milstein Jaar: 2023 ISBN: 9781629639925 Pagina's: 224 Taal: English Uitgever: PM Press Uitgever stad: Oakland Verschijningsdatum: 2023-07-27

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Nourishing Resistance - Het Fort van Sjakoo

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From the cooks who have quietly fed rebels and revolutionaries to the collective kitchens set up after hurricanes and floods, food has long played a crucial role in resistance, protest, and mutual aid. Until very recently, food-based work 'steadfast and not particularly flashy'slipped under the radar or was centered on celebrity chefs and well-funded nonprofits.

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The book provides a toolkit for scholar-activists who want to build transformative visions with communities. Interrogating each case study for valuable lessons, the contributors develop a conceptualisation of a just transformation that focuses on the changes that communities themselves are trying to produce.

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Publisher: Synergetic Press
Format: Book
Binding: pb
Pages: 344
Released: April 19, 2022
ISBN-13: 9780907791935

The book is an interdisciplinary synthesis of research and practice carried out over decades by leaders of the agroecology and regenerative organic agriculture movement. It provides detailed analysis of the multiple crises we face due to chemical and industrial agriculture, including land degradation, water depletion, biodiversity erosion, climate change, agrarian crises, and health crises. The book lays out biodiversity based organic farming and agroecology as the road map for the future of agriculture and sustainable food systems, both locally and globally.

With detailed scientific evidence, Agroecology and Regenerative Agriculture shows how ecological agriculture based on working with nature rather than abasing ecological laws can regenerate the planet, the rural economy, and our health.

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Agroecology and Regenerative Agriculture The book is an interdisciplinary synthesis of research and practice carried out over decades by leaders of the agroecology and regenerative organic agriculture movement. It provides detailed analysis of the multipl

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Women Reflected in Their Own History - Notes - e-flux

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An anonymous letter from the women’s uprising in Iran.

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Field Notes is a new series of reviews from the next generation of art writers. Featuring texts on the 59th Venice Biennale and Documenta 15 contributed by students and recent graduates, Field Notes makes original connections between the work and the world and takes a closer look at what other observers might have missed.
The build-up to Documenta 15 entangled the exhibition's curators and artists in tense debates over representations of Palestine and Israel in German public space. In the weeks preceding the opening, several racist incidents in Kassel and an online smear campaign targeted the Palestinian collective The Question of Funding, the latter of which was picked up by most German media outlets. The conflicts only worsened after an artwork by the Indonesian collective Taring Padi placed in the city's Friedrichplatz included troubling anti-Semitic imagery. Documenta 15 was intended to "speak for itself," [1] 1[2] 2
Documenta 15, "SERIES OF EVENTS "WE NEED TO TALK! ART - FREEDOM - SOLIDARITY" SUSPENDED," May 4, 2022. See
For more on the controversies surrounding Documenta 15's opening, see Jörg Heiser, "'Contested Histories': on Documenta 15," art-agenda, →. →. but even before opening, it fell victim to (self-)censorship, with talks on artistic freedom cancelled and offending artworks removed.

Focusing on equality and collaboration, Documenta 15 was modelled on the [3] 3 lumbung, a traditional Indonesian practice of storing resources and sharing surpluses.
Documenta 15 defines lumbung as follows: "Translated from Indonesian, it means 'rice barn.' In Indonesian rural communities, the surplus harvest is stored in communal rice barns and distributed for the benefit of the community according to jointly defined criteria. This principle stands for the living and working practice of ruangrupa and is used for an interdisciplinary and collaborative work on artistic projects." Documenta 15, "Glossary," 2022. See →. Hoping to challenge the dominant individualistic and capitalistic drives of the art world, ruangrupa invited fourteen collectives to participate, which led to a self-initiated and hyper-horizontal working process to identify the needs and self-limitations of knowledge distribution. Each artistic group received an equal and non-binding budget for its contribution and was expected to develop its idea in dialogue with the other collectives, reflecting the aim of arriving at an outcome that not only pertains to the group's interests but contributes to what may be termed as a curatorial social sculpture. Similar to the Beuysian model of soziale Plastik, ruangrupa perceived its artistic-curatorial process as one of healing and overcoming the barriers between art and society rather than producing yet another murmur in contemporary art's echo chamber. At the same time, contrary to what we often perceive as "social practice," ruangrupa engaged (and encouraged their partners to engage) with already existing networks and communities that closely surround the collectives, rather than seeking to penetrate and connect with communities from an outsider position.

Within this framework, The Question of Funding explored collective resources to question and problematize the economic funding models that sustain cultural structures. Their work, however, was not strictly theoretical. "It is not about institutional critique; we already know it. The question is: how do we practice it? And how do we practice it outside of the art world?," Yazan Khalili, one of the collective's members, told me. Thus, departing from the phenomenon of NGOization that created a new form of colonial control and economic dependency on the Global North in Palestine, The Question of Funding proposed a model of re-embedding cultural practice into local communities and microeconomies. The group turned to the idea of community-governed funding and created Dayra, a blockchain technology for circulating, storing, and exchanging communal resources. Like several collectives participating in Documenta 15-and an extension, perhaps, of Documenta 14's focus on Indigeneity-The Question of Funding made use of local cultural and economic practices, developing Dayra through the process of an-nqoot [dripping]. Often a custom at weddings, an-nqoot is based on the communal sharing of resources with the newlyweds, who repay the debt in the next generation. Similarly, Dayra is a platform on which users enter indebted to share and exchange any resources that the community is willing to accept. For Dayra, Documenta 15 is just a starting point from which the project intends to build a long-lasting tool for the cultural practitioners in Palestine to exchange resources inside and outside their environment.

Following a model of progressive horizontality, The Question of Funding also hosted Eltiqa, a collective based in Gaza. Eltiqa's exhibition, which was shown in a space vandalized with racist slogans just before the opening, consisted of figurative paintings juxtaposed with documents and stories of individual and collective life defined by near-total isolation from the rest of the world. The Documenta-attending public could see and read about abandoning loved ones not allowed to leave Gaza, smuggling art supplies as contraband, dividing funds into a burdening plethora of installments due to financial measures imposed on Gaza, making paintings scaled to fit export regulations, or being unable to escape the political interpretation of their work.

Another resonant voice from the Levant is that of Sada [Regroup] (2011-15), a network of Iraqi artists who led and participated in educational programs for art students living in Baghdad. Sada conducted its programs online long before the Covid-19 pandemic, as most of the artist-teachers lived in exile and continued conflict in Baghdad made it too dangerous to travel. Initiated by Rijin Sahakian, Sada aimed to provide a space for critical thinking and artist-led experimental learning within the underdeveloped and informal local contemporary art scene. Sada's used digital technologies to connect established artists with young art practitioners, and along with the way, this enabled and encouraged students to produce video and film works. This insistence on being seen can be understood as both a result of Sada's pedagogy and an act of disobedience contesting the reality of the aftermath of Baghdad's NATO occupation and the progressive radicalization of local politics that followed.

A series of video works titled Sada [Regroup] presents the outcome of this precarious pedagogical project, which was largely halted by the Islamic State offensive in 2014. The five videos shown by the former members of Sada move from reality to fiction and from documenting art interventions in a Baghdad occupied by an extremist authoritarian regime to a narrative about a fictitious artist who produced paintings of different parts of his body that were dispersed and later found throughout the city. The works take on the period beginning in the 1990s, when Desert Storm propaganda filled Western screens and US soldiers recorded rap videos on their bases, and continue into the present, when looted Iraqi heritage is systematically acquired by its Arabian Gulf neighbors for their cultural megaprojects and ongoing conflict compels Iraqis to migrate to other war-torn countries. As is often the case, history has repeated itself, and most of Sada's former students are now in exile themselves, with life in Baghdad too precarious and the city's art scene scattered around the world.

Documenta 15 no doubt offers an important contribution to discourses on social and pedagogical practices, both in its refreshing curatorial framework and the range of pedagogical and community projects surveyed. At the same time, when "anti-imperialism" is mistaken for "terrorism" and "postcolonial" for "anti-Western," the exhibition's alternative perspective is hard to accept for many, particularly in Europe. As a result, the insightful and often demanding work of collectives such as The Question of Funding, Eltiqa, and Sada has been overshadowed by a largely inward-looking ideological proxy conflict taking place largely in Germany and the Western world. In this context-and after witnessing the disheartening bullying of several Global South (and particularly Arab) makers participating in Documenta 15 and the patronizing explanations of what "curating" and "art" are (unsurprisingly voiced with a tone of Western superiority)-one is tempted to ask a larger question: why invite someone to speak if their words will not be heard?

Mateusz Sapija is a researcher and curator. He graduated from the UCL Qatar MA in Museum Studies and the Goldsmiths College MFA Curating. At the moment, he is working on a PhD in History of Art at the Edinburgh College of Art titled "The Rise of Post-Democracy in Contemporary European Art." He is the current recipient of the Anna Polke Foundation Scholarship. He has worked with numerous art institutions and projects, such as Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), Scotland + Venice (Edinburgh), Asakusa (Tokyo), Sharjah Biennale 12 and Documenta 14 in roles related to research, curating, and public programming.

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Field Notes: The Question of Funding, Eltiqa, and Sada [Regroup], Documenta 15 - School Watch - Art & Education

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Field Notes is a new series of reviews from the next generation of art writers. Featuring texts on the 59th Venice Biennale and Documenta 15 contributed by students and recent graduates, Field Notes makes original connections between the work and the world and takes a closer look at what other observers might have missed.

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THE TYRANNY of STRUCTURELESSNESS
by Jo Freeman aka Joreen

The earliest version of this article was given as a talk at a conference called by the Southern Female Rights Union, held in Beulah, Mississippi in May 1970. It was written up for Notes from the Third Year (1971), but the editors did not use it. It was then submitted to several movement publications, but only one asked permission to publish it; others did so without permission. The first official place of publication was in Vol. 2, No. 1 of The Second Wave (1972). This early version in movement publications was authored by Joreen. Different versions were published in the Berkeley Journal of Sociology, Vol. 17, 1972-73, pp. 151-165, and Ms. magazine, July 1973, pp. 76-78, 86-89, authored by Jo Freeman. This piece spread all over the world. Numerous people have edited, reprinted, cut, and translated "Tyranny" for magazines, books and web sites, usually without the permission or knowledge of the author. The version below is a blend of the three cited here.

During the years in which the women's liberation movement has been taking shape, a great emphasis has been placed on what are called leaderless, structureless groups as the main -- if not sole -- organizational form of the movement. The source of this idea was a natural reaction against the over-structured society in which most of us found ourselves, and the inevitable control this gave others over our lives, and the continual elitism of the Left and similar groups among those who were supposedly fighting this overstructuredness.
The idea of "structurelessness," however, has moved from a healthy counter to those tendencies to becoming a goddess in its own right. The idea is as little examined as the term is much used, but it has become an intrinsic and unquestioned part of women's liberation ideology. For the early development of the movement this did not much matter. It early defined its main goal, and its main method, as consciousness-raising, and the "structureless" rap group was an excellent means to this end. The looseness and informality of it encouraged participation in discussion, and its often supportive atmosphere elicited personal insight. If nothing more concrete than personal insight ever resulted from these groups, that did not much matter, because their purpose did not really extend beyond this.

The basic problems didn't appear until individual rap groups exhausted the virtues of consciousness-raising and decided they wanted to do something more specific. At this point they usually foundered because most groups were unwilling to change their structure when they changed their tasks. Women had thoroughly accepted the idea of "structurelessness" without realizing the limitations of its uses. People would try to use the "structureless" group and the informal conference for purposes for which they were unsuitable out of a blind belief that no other means could possibly be anything but oppressive.
If the movement is to grow beyond these elementary stages of development, it will have to disabuse itself of some of its prejudices about organization and structure. There is nothing inherently bad about either of these. They can be and often are misused, but to reject them out of hand because they are misused is to deny ourselves the necessary tools to further development. We need to understand why "structurelessness" does not work.

FORMAL AND INFORMAL STRUCTURES

Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a structureless group. Any group of people of whatever nature that comes together for any length of time for any purpose will inevitably structure itself in some fashion. The structure may be flexible; it may vary over time; it may evenly or unevenly distribute tasks, power and resources over the members of the group. But it will be formed regardless of the abilities, personalities, or intentions of the people involved. The very fact that we are individuals, with different talents, predispositions, and backgrounds makes this inevitable. Only if we refused to relate or interact on any basis whatsoever could we approximate structurelessness -- and that is not the nature of a human group.
This means that to strive for a structureless group is as useful, and as deceptive, as to aim at an "objective" news story, "value-free" social science, or a "free" economy. A "laissez faire" group is about as realistic as a "laissez faire" society; the idea becomes a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others. This hegemony can be so easily established because the idea of "structurelessness" does not prevent the formation of informal structures, only formal ones. Similarly "laissez faire" philosophy did not prevent the economically powerful from establishing control over wages, prices, and distribution of goods; it only prevented the government from doing so. Thus structurelessness becomes a way of masking power, and within the women's movement is usually most strongly advocated by those who are the most powerful (whether they are conscious of their power or not). As long as the structure of the group is informal, the rules of how decisions are made are known only to a few and awareness of power is limited to those who know the rules. Those who do not know the rules and are not chosen for initiation must remain in confusion, or suffer from paranoid delusions that something is happening of which they are not quite aware.

For everyone to have the opportunity to be involved in a given group and to participate in its activities the structure must be explicit, not implicit. The rules of decision-making must be open and available to everyone, and this can happen only if they are formalized. This is not to say that formalization of a structure of a group will destroy the informal structure. It usually doesn't. But it does hinder the informal structure from having predominant control and make available some means of attacking it if the people involved are not at least responsible to the needs of the group at large. "Structurelessness" is organizationally impossible. We cannot decide whether to have a structured or structureless group, only whether or not to have a formally structured one. Therefore the word will not be used any longer except to refer to the idea it represents. Unstructured will refer to those groups which have not been deliberately structured in a particular manner. Structured will refer to those which have. A Structured group always has formal structure, and may also have an informal, or covert, structure. It is this informal structure, particularly in Unstructured groups, which forms the basis for elites.

THE NATURE OF ELITISM

"Elitist" is probably the most abused word in the women's liberation movement. It is used as frequently, and for the same reasons, as "pinko" was used in the fifties. It is rarely used correctly. Within the movement it commonly refers to individuals, though the personal characteristics and activities of those to whom it is directed may differ widely: An individual, as an individual can never be an elitist, because the only proper application of the term "elite" is to groups. Any individual, regardless of how well-known that person may be, can never be an elite.
Correctly, an elite refers to a small group of people who have power over a larger group of which they are part, usually without direct responsibility to that larger group, and often without their knowledge or consent. A person becomes an elitist by being part of, or advocating the rule by, such a small group, whether or not that individual is well known or not known at all. Notoriety is not a definition of an elitist. The most insidious elites are usually run by people not known to the larger public at all. Intelligent elitists are usually smart enough not to allow themselves to become well known; when they become known, they are watched, and the mask over their power is no longer firmly lodged.
Elites are not conspiracies. Very seldom does a small group of people get together and deliberately try to take over a larger group for its own ends. Elites are nothing more, and nothing less, than groups of friends who also happen to participate in the same political activities. They would probably maintain their friendship whether or not they were involved in political activities; they would probably be involved in political activities whether or not they maintained their friendships. It is the coincidence of these two phenomena which creates elites in any group and makes them so difficult to break.
These friendship groups function as networks of communication outside any regular channels for such communication that may have been set up by a group. If no channels are set up, they function as the only networks of communication. Because people are friends, because they usually share the same values and orientations, because they talk to each other socially and consult with each other when common decisions have to be made, the people involved in these networks have more power in the group than those who don't. And it is a rare group that does not establish some informal networks of communication through the friends that are made in it.
Some groups, depending on their size, may have more than one such informal communications network. Networks may even overlap. When only one such network exists, it is the elite of an otherwise Unstructured group, whether the participants in it want to be elitists or not. If it is the only such network in a Structured group it may or may not be an elite depending on its composition and the nature of the formal Structure. If there are two or more such networks of friends, they may compete for power within the group, thus forming factions, or one may deliberately opt out of the competition, leaving the other as the elite. In a Structured group, two or more such friendship networks usually compete with each other for formal power. This is often the healthiest situation, as the other members are in a position to arbitrate between the two competitors for power and thus to make demands on those to whom they give their temporary allegiance.
The inevitably elitist and exclusive nature of informal communication networks of friends is neither a new phenomenon characteristic of the women's movement nor a phenomenon new to women. Such informal relationships have excluded women for centuries from participating in integrated groups of which they were a part. In any profession or organization these networks have created the "locker room" mentality and the "old school" ties which have effectively prevented women as a group (as well as some men individually) from having equal access to the sources of power or social reward. Much of the energy of past women's movements has been directed to having the structures of decision-making and the selection processes formalized so that the exclusion of women could be confronted directly. As we well know, these efforts have not prevented the informal male-only networks from discriminating against women, but they have made it more difficult.
Because elites are informal does not mean they are invisible. At any small group meeting anyone with a sharp eye and an acute ear can tell who is influencing whom. The members of a friendship group will relate more to each other than to other people. They listen more attentively, and interrupt less; they repeat each other's points and give in amiably; they tend to ignore or grapple with the "outs" whose approval is not necessary for making a decision. But it is necessary for the "outs" to stay on good terms with the "ins." Of course the lines are not as sharp as I have drawn them. They are nuances of interaction, not prewritten scripts. But they are discernible, and they do have their effect. Once one knows with whom it is important to check before a decision is made, and whose approval is the stamp of acceptance, one knows who is running things.
Since movement groups have made no concrete decisions about who shall exercise power within them, many different criteria are used around the country. Most criteria are along the lines of traditional female characteristics. For instance, in the early days of the movement, marriage was usually a prerequisite for participation in the informal elite. As women have been traditionally taught, married women relate primarily to each other, and look upon single women as too threatening to have as close friends. In many cities, this criterion was further refined to include only those women married to New Left men. This standard had more than tradition behind it, however, because New Left men often had access to resources needed by the movement -- such as mailing lists, printing presses, contacts, and information -- and women were used to getting what they needed through men rather than independently. As the movement has charged through time, marriage has become a less universal criterion for effective participation, but all informal elites establish standards by which only women who possess certain material or personal characteristics may join. They frequently include: middle-class background (despite all the rhetoric about relating to the working class); being married; not being married but living with someone; being or pretending to be a lesbian; being between the ages of twenty and thirty; being college educated or at least having some college background; being "hip"; not being too "hip"; holding a certain political line or identification as a "radical"; having children or at least liking them; not having children; having certain "feminine" personality characteristics such as being "nice"; dressing right (whether in the traditional style or the antitraditional style); etc. There are also some characteristics which will almost always tag one as a "deviant" who should not be related to. They include: being too old; working full time, particularly if one is actively committed to a "career"; not being "nice"; and being avowedly single (i.e., neither actively heterosexual nor homosexual).
Other criteria could be included, but they all have common themes. The characteristics prerequisite for participating in the informal elites of the movement, and thus for exercising power, concern one's background, personality, or allocation of time. They do not include one's competence, dedication to feminism, talents, or potential contribution to the movement. The former are the criteria one usually uses in determining one's friends. The latter are what any movement or organization has to use if it is going to be politically effective.
The criteria of participation may differ from group to group, but the means of becoming a member of the informal elite if one meets those criteria art pretty much the same. The only main difference depends on whether one is in a group from the beginning, or joins it after it has begun. If involved from the beginning it is important to have as many of one's personal friends as possible also join. If no one knows anyone else very well, then one must deliberately form friendships with a select number and establish the informal interaction patterns crucial to the creation of an informal structure. Once the informal patterns are formed they act to maintain themselves, and one of the most successful tactics of maintenance is to continuously recruit new people who "fit in." One joins such an elite much the same way one pledges a sorority. If perceived as a potential addition, one is "rushed" by the members of the informal structure and eventually either dropped or initiated. If the sorority is not politically aware enough to actively engage in this process itself it can be started by the outsider pretty much the same way one joins any private club. Find a sponsor, i.e., pick some member of the elite who appears to be well respected within it, and actively cultivate that person's friendship. Eventually, she will most likely bring you into the inner circle.

All of these procedures take time. So if one works full time or has a similar major commitment, it is usually impossible to join simply because there are not enough hours left to go to all the meetings and cultivate the personal relationship necessary to have a voice in the decision-making. That is why formal structures of decision making are a boon to the overworked person. Having an established process for decision-making ensures that everyone can participate in it to some extent.
Although this dissection of the process of elite formation within small groups has been critical in perspective, it is not made in the belief that these informal structures are inevitably bad -- merely inevitable. All groups create informal structures as a result of interaction patterns among the members of the group. Such informal structures can do very useful things But only Unstructured groups are totally governed by them. When informal elites are combined with a myth of "structurelessness," there can be no attempt to put limits on the use of power. It becomes capricious.
This has two potentially negative consequences of which we should be aware. The first is that the informal structure of decision-making will be much like a sorority -- one in which people listen to others because they like them and not because they say significant things. As long as the movement does not do significant things this does not much matter. But if its development is not to be arrested at this preliminary stage, it will have to alter this trend. The second is that informal structures have no obligation to be responsible to the group at large. Their power was not given to them; it cannot be taken away. Their influence is not based on what they do for the group; therefore they cannot be directly influenced by the group. This does not necessarily make informal structures irresponsible. Those who are concerned with maintaining their influence will usually try to be responsible. The group simply cannot compel such responsibility; it is dependent on the interests of the elite.

THE "STAR" SYSTEM

The idea of "structurelessness" has created the "star" system. We live in a society which expects political groups to make decisions and to select people to articulate those decisions to the public at large. The press and the public do not know how to listen seriously to individual women as women; they want to know how the group feels. Only three techniques have ever been developed for establishing mass group opinion: the vote or referendum, the public opinion survey questionnaire, and the selection of group spokespeople at an appropriate meeting. The women's liberation movement has used none of these to communicate with the public. Neither the movement as a whole nor most of the multitudinous groups within it have established a means of explaining their position on various issues. But the public is conditioned to look for spokespeople.
While it has consciously not chosen spokespeople, the movement has thrown up many women who have caught the public eye for varying reasons. These women represent no particular group or established opinion; they know this and usually say so. But because there are no official spokespeople nor any decision-making body that the press can query when it wants to know the movement's position on a subject, these women are perceived as the spokespeople. Thus, whether they want to or not, whether the movement likes it or not, women of public note are put in the role of spokespeople by default.
This is one main source of the ire that is often felt toward the women who are labeled "stars." Because they were not selected by the women in the movement to represent the movement's views, they are resented when the press presumes that they speak for the movement. But as long as the movement does not select its own spokeswomen, such women will be placed in that role by the press and the public, regardless of their own desires.
This has several negative consequences for both the movement and the women labeled "stars." First, because the movement didn't put them in the role of spokesperson, the movement cannot remove them. The press put them there and only the press can choose not to listen. The press will continue to look to "stars" as spokeswomen as long as it has no official alternatives to go to for authoritative statements from the movement. The movement has no control in the selection of its representatives to the public as long as it believes that it should have no representatives at all. Second, women put in this position often find themselves viciously attacked by their sisters. This achieves nothing for the movement and is painfully destructive to the individuals involved. Such attacks only result in either the woman leaving the movement entirely-often bitterly alienated -- or in her ceasing to feel responsible to her "sisters." She may maintain some loyalty to the movement, vaguely defined, but she is no longer susceptible to pressures from other women in it. One cannot feel responsible to people who have been the source of such pain without being a masochist, and these women are usually too strong to bow to that kind of personal pressure. Thus the backlash to the "star" system in effect encourages the very kind of individualistic nonresponsibility that the movement condemns. By purging a sister as a "star," the movement loses whatever control it may have had over the person who then becomes free to commit all of the individualistic sins of which she has been accused.

POLITICAL IMPOTENCE

Unstructured groups may be very effective in getting women to talk about their lives; they aren't very good for getting things done. It is when people get tired of "just talking" and want to do something more that the groups flounder, unless they change the nature of their operation. Occasionally, the developed informal structure of the group coincides with an available need that the group can fill in such a way as to give the appearance that an Unstructured group "works." That is, the group has fortuitously developed precisely the kind of structure best suited for engaging in a particular project.
While working in this kind of group is a very heady experience, it is also rare and very hard to replicate. There are almost inevitably four conditions found in such a group;

1) It is task oriented. Its function is very narrow and very specific, like putting on a conference or putting out a newspaper. It is the task that basically structures the group. The task determines what needs to be done and when it needs to be done. It provides a guide by which people can judge their actions and make plans for future activity.
2) It is relatively small and homogeneous. Homogeneity is necessary to insure that participants have a "common language" for interaction. People from widely different backgrounds may provide richness to a consciousness-raising group where each can learn from the others' experience, but too great a diversity among members of a task-oriented group means only that they continually misunderstand each other. Such diverse people interpret words and actions differently. They have different expectations about each other's behavior and judge the results according to different criteria. If everyone knows everyone else well enough to understand the nuances, these can be accommodated. Usually, they only lead to confusion and endless hours spent straightening out conflicts no one ever thought would arise.
3) There is a high degree of communication. Information must be passed on to everyone, opinions checked, work divided up, and participation assured in the relevant decisions. This is only possible if the group is small and people practically live together for the most crucial phases of the task. Needless to say, the number of interactions necessary to involve everybody increases geometrically with the number of participants. This inevitably limits group participants to about five, or excludes some from some of the decisions. Successful groups can be as large as 10 or 15, but only when they are in fact composed of several smaller subgroups which perform specific parts of the task, and whose members overlap with each other so that knowledge of what the different subgroups are doing can be passed around easily.
4) There is a low degree of skill specialization. Not everyone has to be able to do everything, but everything must be able to be done by more than one person. Thus no one is indispensable. To a certain extent, people become interchangeable parts.

While these conditions can occur serendipitously in small groups, this is not possible in large ones. Consequently, because the larger movement in most cities is as unstructured as individual rap groups, it is not too much more effective than the separate groups at specific tasks. The informal structure is rarely together enough or in touch enough with the people to be able to operate effectively. So the movement generates much motion and few results. Unfortunately, the consequences of all this motion are not as innocuous as the results' and their victim is the movement itself.
Some groups have formed themselves into local action projects if they do not involve many people and work on a small scale. But this form restricts movement activity to the local level; it cannot be done on the regional or national. Also, to function well the groups must usually pare themselves down to that informal group of friends who were running things in the first place. This excludes many women from participating. As long as the only way women can participate in the movement is through membership in a small group, the nongregarious are at a distinct disadvantage. As long as friendship groups are the main means of organizational activity, elitism becomes institutionalized.
For those groups which cannot find a local project to which to devote themselves, the mere act of staying together becomes the reason for their staying together. When a group has no specific task (and consciousness raising is a task), the people in it turn their energies to controlling others in the group. This is not done so much out of a malicious desire to manipulate others (though sometimes it is) as out of a lack of anything better to do with their talents. Able people with time on their hands and a need to justify their coming together put their efforts into personal control, and spend their time criticizing the personalities of the other members in the group. Infighting and personal power games rule the day. When a group is involved in a task, people learn to get along with others as they are and to subsume personal dislikes for the sake of the larger goal. There are limits placed on the compulsion to remold every person in our image of what they should be.

The end of consciousness-raising leaves people with no place to go, and the lack of structure leaves them with no way of getting there. The women the movement either turn in on themselves and their sisters or seek other alternatives of action. There are few that are available. Some women just "do their own thing." This can lead to a great deal of individual creativity, much of which is useful for the movement, but it is not a viable alternative for most women and certainly does not foster a spirit of cooperative group effort. Other women drift out of the movement entirely because they don't want to develop an individual project and they have found no way of discovering, joining, or starting group projects that interest them.
Many turn to other political organizations to give them the kind of structured, effective activity that they have not been able to find in the women's movement. Those political organizations which see women's liberation as only one of many issues to which women should devote their time thus find the movement a vast recruiting ground for new members. There is no need for such organizations to "infiltrate" (though this is not precluded). The desire for meaningful political activity generated in women by their becoming part of the women's liberation movement is sufficient to make them eager to join other organizations when the movement itself provides no outlets for their new ideas and energies. Those women who join other political organizations while remaining within the women's liberation movement, or who join women's liberation while remaining in other political organizations, in turn become the framework for new informal structures. These friendship networks are based upon their common nonfeminist politics rather than the characteristics discussed earlier, but operate in much the same way. Because these women share common values, ideas, and political orientations, they too become informal, unplanned, unselected, unresponsible elites -- whether they intend to be so or not.
These new informal elites are often perceived as threats by the old informal elites previously developed within different movement groups. This is a correct perception. Such politically oriented networks are rarely willing to be merely "sororities" as many of the old ones were, and want to proselytize their political as well as their feminist ideas. This is only natural, but its implications for women's liberation have never been adequately discussed. The old elites are rarely willing to bring such differences of opinion out into the open because it would involve exposing the nature of the informal structure of the group.
Many of these informal elites have been hiding under the banner of "anti-elitism" and "structurelessness." To effectively counter the competition from another informal structure, they would have to become "public," and this possibility is fraught with many dangerous implications. Thus, to maintain its own power, it is easier to rationalize the exclusion of the members of the other informal structure by such means as "red-baiting," "reformist-baiting," "lesbian-baiting," or "straight-baiting." The only other alternative is to formally structure the group in such a way that the original power structure is institutionalized. This is not always possible. If the informal elites have been well structured and have exercised a fair amount of power in the past, such a task is feasible. These groups have a history of being somewhat politically effective in the past, as the tightness of the informal structure has proven an adequate substitute for a formal structure. Becoming Structured does not alter their operation much, though the institutionalization of the power structure does open it to formal challenge. It is those groups which are in greatest need of structure that are often least capable of creating it. Their informal structures have not been too well formed and adherence to the ideology of "structurelessness" makes them reluctant to change tactics. The more Unstructured a group is, the more lacking it is in informal structures, and the more it adheres to an ideology of "structurelessness," the more vulnerable it is to being taken over by a group of political comrades.
Since the movement at large is just as Unstructured as most of its constituent groups, it is similarly susceptible to indirect influence. But the phenomenon manifests itself differently. On a local level most groups can operate autonomously; but the only groups that can organize a national activity are nationally organized groups. Thus, it is often the Structured feminist organizations that provide national direction for feminist activities, and this direction is determined by the priorities of those organizations. Such groups as NOW, WEAL, and some leftist women's caucuses are simply the only organizations capable of mounting a national campaign. The multitude of Unstructured women's liberation groups can choose to support or not support the national campaigns, but are incapable of mounting their own. Thus their members become the troops under the leadership of the Structured organizations. The avowedly Unstructured groups have no way of drawing upon the movement's vast resources to support its priorities. It doesn't even have a way of deciding what they are.
The more unstructured a movement it, the less control it has over the directions in which it develops and the political actions in which it engages. This does not mean that its ideas do not spread. Given a certain amount of interest by the media and the appropriateness of social conditions, the ideas will still be diffused widely. But diffusion of ideas does not mean they are implemented; it only means they are talked about. Insofar as they can be applied individually they may be acted on; insofar as they require coordinated political power to be implemented, they will not be.
As long as the women's liberation movement stays dedicated to a form of organization which stresses small, inactive discussion groups among friends, the worst problems of Unstructuredness will not be felt. But this style of organization has its limits; it is politically inefficacious, exclusive, and discriminatory against those women who are not or cannot be tied into the friendship networks. Those who do not fit into what already exists because of class, race, occupation, education, parental or marital status, personality, etc., will inevitably be discouraged from trying to participate. Those who do fit in will develop vested interests in maintaining things as they are.
The informal groups' vested interests will be sustained by the informal structures which exist, and the movement will have no way of determining who shall exercise power within it. If the movement continues deliberately to not select who shall exercise power, it does not thereby abolish power. All it does is abdicate the right to demand that those who do exercise power and influence be responsible for it. If the movement continues to keep power as diffuse as possible because it knows it cannot demand responsibility from those who have it, it does prevent any group or person from totally dominating. But it simultaneously insures that the movement is as ineffective as possible. Some middle ground between domination and ineffectiveness can and must be found.
These problems are coming to a head at this time because the nature of the movement is necessarily changing. Consciousness-raising as the main function of the women's liberation movement is becoming obsolete. Due to the intense press publicity of the last two years and the numerous overground books and articles now being circulated, women's liberation has become a household word. Its issues are discussed and informal rap groups are formed by people who have no explicit connection with any movement group. The movement must go on to other tasks. It now needs to establish its priorities, articulate its goals, and pursue its objectives in a coordinated fashion. To do this it must get organized -- locally, regionally, and nationally.

PRINCIPLES OF DEMOCRATIC STRUCTURING

Once the movement no longer clings tenaciously to the ideology of "structurelessness," it is free to develop those forms of organization best suited to its healthy functioning. This does not mean that we should go to the other extreme and blindly imitate the traditional forms of organization. But neither should we blindly reject them all. Some of the traditional techniques will prove useful, albeit not perfect; some will give us insights into what we should and should not do to obtain certain ends with minimal costs to the individuals in the movement. Mostly, we will have to experiment with different kinds of structuring and develop a variety of techniques to use for different situations. The Lot System is one such idea which has emerged from the movement. It is not applicable to all situations, but is useful in some. Other ideas for structuring are needed. But before we can proceed to experiment intelligently, we must accept the idea that there is nothing inherently bad about structure itself -- only its excess use.

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The Tyranny of Stuctureless by Jo Freeman

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Office Hours: Danny Giles: Piet Zwart Institute - School Watch - Art & Education

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Office Hours: Danny Giles: Piet Zwart Institute // July 13, 2021 //

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In the context of contemporary forms of labor, "production" is often discussed and glamorized. But what is overlooked is the exhaustion that follows it: the times of fatigue, procrastination, or anxiety. Society celebrates success, extrovertism, and ecstasy, but does not see silence, isolation, or slowness as part of the same reality. "Home" is at the center of it all; a thick site of production and reproduction. But despite the traditional association of home with resting and comfort, it is also the locus of struggle. It drives us mad, but also comforts us. It marks the wide and radically diverse range of everyday practices: breakdowns, exhaustion, withdrawal, intimacy, kinship, comfort. We spend days fatigued in our beds. We cry in the shower. We make kin at the dinner table.

Industrialization, institutionalization, individualization, and (neo)colonization have shaped contemporary forms of life in such a way that there is little division between what is considered productive work and all other practices of living. There is no fixed timeframe or place for work; few employment contracts encompass pre- or post-office-hour labor activities such as checking emails on the bus or hanging out after work for a few drinks to network. In the current neoliberal racial-capitalist global condition, forms of life are not systematized based on the separation of work and life, but on their fragmentation and blending. To imagine alternative practices of existing in the world, we have to reclaim life. But we cannot simply exclude work.

1. The Predictability of Precarized Life

The home today is a product of the development of (Western) thought on the universality of forms of living in the post-industrial era. It derives from spatial archetypes developed in the early twentieth century as a result of architectural attempts, social justice movements, and regulatory frameworks responding to the capitalist housing crises of the time. But it was only in the face of epidemics, poor urban hygiene, and the demise of worker populations in the beginning of the century that the corporeal wellbeing of the people became a concern for reluctant European states. In her memoir, the Dutch suffragette activist Aletta Jacobs recounts her visits to the Jordaan neighborhood in Amsterdam:

Through my free consultations in the Jordaan, I came into close contact with the capital's poor and neediest. When the women or children were too ill to come and consult me, I often visited them at their homes. What misery I witnessed there! What struck me more than the terrible poverty of so many families was the disgraceful housing conditions in many of the city's poorer districts. How was it possible that people could live in such hovels? Why did the government allow these abuses to continue?

Across Western Europe, such observations, documentations, and articulations of crises on the ground by suffragettes and socialist elites not only resulted in the states' realization that the health crisis is entangled with the survival of the state's own wealth and health, but also made way for the crisis to be partly understood as an issue of space. It thus became the state's task to house the collective body. Hardly affordable within its existing spatial and socioeconomic paradigms, however-even with the wealth accumulated from colonial trade and slavery-it was necessary to create a new model. Whether through direct commission or with their sights set clearly on the state, modern architects in the 1920s and 1930s intensely debated and developed the notion of existensminimum for the "servant-less" population.

In order to understand the existence of the worker subject and its supposedly minimized needs, elite architects started studying and mapping the lives of the heteronormative family of the "living income earner." Dutch architect Mart Stam, for instance, created twenty-four-hour timelines for each member of the typical working-class family, and demonstrated the separation of work from home and the absence of the ones who perform it (here, the father). Stam's daily schedule maps the times when each family member is either in or out the house, when they are commuting, and when and where they eat. To do this, he uses different linetypes to communicate the difference between production, reproduction, and leisure time. Time spent outside the house, including the father going to work and children going to school, is left blank, while time spent at home by the mother and an infant is marked with a dashed line. Thick lines demonstrating eight hours of sleep for both mother and father extend into two completely different linetypes: one into blankness and the other showing a (dashed) continuity.

Stam concludes his research focusing mostly on the absence of the father (the "breadwinner"). He states that when father is not home to eat lunch, there is no need to have a dining place set up:

Breakfast is very rarely taken together in the family life of the worker (the father has to go to work early); the midday meal is also seldom taken together; usually the father takes bread and coffee with him; the father eats together with the other family members only in the evening... It is striking that the house now seems to be little more than a place to sleep for the industrial worker.

The diagram as a biopolitical device undermines the agency of the working class subject by rationalizing a constrained set of activities to argue for the predictability of families' lives. This predictability makes working class life (and thus, its home) generalizable. Stam eventually argues that the little contact between family members justifies the need for smaller homes.

While the introduction of productive labor into the house predates the pandemic, it has only been intensified by it. Most time is spent inside the house. Thus for many workers today, the dashed line of the home spans over the whole twenty-four-hour timetable. The houses we live in today are the same houses that resulted from the same studies and sociopolitical thought about "minimized" homes. But there is no such predictability to the dashed-lined daily life of today.

2. Precarized "Guest"

To think of the worker beyond the mechanisms and boundaries of gender or class is to think across geopolitical borders and the border regime. It is to think across the continuous, blank, and dashed lines on the map which constitute for each individual different relations with the state. Global asymmetries of power force migrations that are not only matters of domestic concern, but a result of state-mediated global extraction. One of the modes this displacement and its consequent precarization takes place is through Temporary Migration Programs, or other legal frameworks that entangle work and migration. Temporary migrant workers are differentiated from worker subjects as their labor power is captured first by the border regime, and only then extracted by their employment structures. These migration schemes are a crucial method of capital accumulation within contested sites of wealth distribution around the world. According to Harsha Walia:

While migrant workers are temporary, temporary migration is permanent. Temporary migration has become a modality central to state formation, citizenship regulation, labor segmentation within national labor markets, and segregated social ordering.

The global dynamics of capital and the world economy after World War II conditioned unemployment in certain geopolitical territories and a shortage of laboring bodies in others. Establishing recruitment agreements among them created a flow of bodies from one territory to another, exclusively for work. "Guest workers" were recruited across Western Europe to rebuild war-torn cities, tasked with working in harbors, construction, and coal mines, underpinned by a temporary guest status.

In the Netherlands, starting in the 1960s guest workers came from southern and eastern Europe, Turkey, Morocco, and Pakistan, among other places. In the absence of any systematic municipal or state schemes to ensure they were provided appropriate living space, these individuals were largely accommodated in boarding houses, many of which were just privately-owned family houses with multiple beds. Racial and ethnic segregation via a spatial distribution of migrant workers across the territory created dire living conditions. As a result, and with support groups such as AKPG (Pro-Guest Worker Action Committee), guest workers organized protests, squatting actions, and negotiations with tenancy committees ( huurcommissie). They did this to assert the severity of the issue, but also just to make space for themselves. In response, their movements faced violence from neighbors, locals, and the media. Houses would be attacked, not only by neighbors but also by other (mainly white) squatting groups. The migrant worker was neither considered a worker nor an activist due to their guestly citizenship.

The 1970s oil crisis in the West was largely caused by colonial interventions in the Middle East and North Africa and resulted in displacement, war, revolutions, and general political precarity in these territories. With the end of the crisis and the stabilization of oil prices, the intensive extraction of European coal mines were rendered unnecessary. This shift in the global handling of fuel altered the landscape and flow of human labor, and coincided with the termination of many guest worker migration programs across Europe. In some countries such as Netherlands and France, Family Reunification Programs were introduced that legalized moving workers' families to Europe. In the Netherlands, the term "guest worker" ( gastarbeider) was replaced by " allochtoon," which means "person from another land." This shift in terminology marks the national(ist) realization that people who came temporarily to work are possibly staying permanently.

A virtual, legal, and ideological difference was thus created between the guest worker subject and the (already) citizen worker subject, not based on workerness but on citizenship and relations to territory. The term "allochtoon" has a particularly discriminatory and racist aspect: as the "guest worker" stays and become someone "not born here," their labor becomes removed from their subjecthood. The removal of labor from subjecthood (and from the national imaginary) marks an exclusionary relation to land, racializing the migrant worker subject while nationalizing the working class.

3. Displacement, Gentrification, Evictability

Temporariness or a lack of permanent status can be understood through the concept of eviction. Eviction constitutes a precarized relation to land that comes from colonial frameworks and histories. Citizenship as a framework of relating individuals to nation states, and by extension, to land, is used as an instrument of precarization and eviction, as well. This applies to the "illegal" migrant, the asylum seeker, the legal migrant who might get deported, the Palestinian right of return, people in forced political exile, temporary citizenships via visas, etc. This precarization can take many different forms, with citizenship as an instrument at its core. The (un)foreseeable possibility of being evicted is one that could be considered in relation to a more fundamental condition of "evictability." For "eviction," according to Huub van Baar, Brenna Bhandar, and Martina Tazzioli, "is also never just spatial."

As a mechanism of eviction, gentrification has precarized marginalized and working class bodies since the early twentieth century. As a response to the Great Depression, for instance, and the increased possibility of being evicted resulting from unemployment and reduced industrial productivity, the working class in many European cities organized a series of collective rent strikes. In the Netherlands, the collective refusal of rent increases were systematized and structured through Central Advisory Councils and collective neighborhood-initiated strike funds, which allowed the strikes to span over multiple years. As a result, regulatory frameworks were devised to protect the rights of tenants. Despite the historical differences, the market dynamics and mechanisms of eviction then are strikingly similar to those of today:

We went on a rent strike because we couldn't afford the rent. I mean: we all had to move out of our old houses, they were being renovated. And then you come back, and you have to pay two hundred guilders more.

The labor of striking was performed largely by those who spent most of their time at home: women, elderly, and the unemployed. Dutch Association of Housewives, for instance, considered women to be key "stakeholders" in the problem of housing. The strikers labored to insist that it had to be "food first, rent second." While contemporaneous with each other, there is a meaningful shift in agency between the stay-at-home subject in Mart Stam's timetable and the striker that resists eviction. Here, the ones advocating for their rights are ones at home, while the traditional figure of the worker is outside of political action. Striking, or refusing to move, to be displaced, is a collective labor that can resist the process of displacement. A rent strike is the collective labor of becoming as heavy as stone.

Precarity is a defining feature of contemporary forms of work. Even fixed-employment contracts are structured based on the mechanisms of the gig economy. Relations to land have also become increasingly precarized, as workers live life awaiting eviction, being displaced from houses, neighborhoods, or citizenships. Evictability has become a condition of living. Precarious lives today are not only based on precarization of labor, but on an insecurity that infiltrates the whole of existence, the whole body. The labor it takes to deal with the psycho-temporal dimensions of waiting, or resisting eviction is far above the wages one receives.

4. The Labor of Subsiding

Processes of precarization place "insecurity" as the central concern of the subject who has to live with the unforeseeable, with contingency. As evictability becomes a condition of forms of life, eviction is the labor of moving for the displaced body. Displacements from citizenship, geopolitical borders, and the thick barrier of visa regimes weigh differently on the body. To carry one's body to a new home, to migrate, even when comfort is imagined prospectively, is hard work. Migration is work; the labor of negotiating a relation to land and citizenship. Yet this labor, extracted over a period of many years, even a lifetime, takes place in the perpetual presence of evictability.

Work validates one's being-here. Here, where there is capital accumulated from the working of other bodies. Being able to work can be a privilege that creates a pathway into fortified forms of comfort. Working is also nesting, a way to anchor, to refuse to be moved. Many times, this means to extend and expand one's body to other bodies. To create a collective body through networks of kin, to be able to collectively weigh heavy, to resist displacement, to become space.

Do not tell me to work less.

Working for me is the basis of me being here. Me being here and writing this, is directly dependent on me working. And I am thinking about an understanding of "being here" that is administrational. That implies an access granted. A being-here which is defined in relation to everyone else's other forms of being-heres.

I talk about a being-here that is fragile and needs to be maintained, regularly, that needs to be evaluated, regularly, to be "allowed" regularly. I am thinking of forms of being-here that are conceptualized on the back of citizenship. Being-heres that get evaluated based on measures that "working" can supplement and assure.

It is also a being-here that means not being "there." Or perhaps, being in two places at the same time. A being-here that is also in the frame of a constant being away (and maybe "getting away"). A being-here that is a privilege, but also feels like a big fat compromise. A being-here that is regular, but also a heavy investment. A being-here which when writing about I cannot help but weep.

*

Do not tell me to work less. My working is the basis of my being-here. I understand that me being exhausted can be frustrating. That I do not have to do this much work, and be exhausted all the time.

But no. I do.

I live a life of maintaining my being-here. Do not tell me to work less. Or that I need to rest more. Do not tell me that I need to manage my time better, or that I do not understand that working is not all there is to life. I work so hard because I cannot afford not to. I work so hard to make space for myself and for the people I love around me to also be-here. To extend beyond myself and the space I inhabit, to make a bit more space for my peoples to inhabit that space together with me.

*

Do you know a life that is fragmented into many many different pieces? My being extends across so many cities, institutions, buildings, countries, borders. My body is fragmented into multitudes. My bodies are laying across lands, laying on hot soils, and on dried pomegranates that fell from the trees. My bodies are hanging over barbed wire fences and standing in lines at the airport, or maybe outside of it. My bodies are hanging out at the museum entrance, are laying on the rocky mountain foot. My bodies are one. And my one body augments so it can remain being-here.

*

I am talking about a being-here that is being right at the door of the fort trying to get in it. Constantly. And so when I think about comfort, I think about these forts that keep some of us working hard. And I am thinking about the comfort created by fortified citizenships (I guess all citizenship is fortified?). When I think of comfort, I think about being-here in a fortified geography and also in endless abstract fortified territories. When I think about comfort, I think about trying to get in. When I think about comfort I think about compromise; and working so hard to a point of exhaustion.

*

The work of maintaining being-here is separate from the work of providing for the maintenance of being-here.

The work of providing for the maintenance of being-here is separate from the work of providing for survival.

The work of providing for survival is different from the work of maintaining being-here.

The work of maintaining being-here is separate from the work of providing for the maintaining being-here.

The work of providing for the maintenance of being-here is separate from the work of providing for survival.

The work of providing for survival is different from the work of maintaining being-here.

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Laboring for Home: Working to Stay, Working to Move - Architecture - e-flux

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In the context of contemporary forms of labor, "production" is often discussed and glamorized. But what is overlooked is the exhaustion that follows it: the times of fatigue, procrastination, or anxiety. Society celebrates success, extrovertism, and ecstasy, but does not see silence, isolation, or slowness as part of the same reality.

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DECOLONIZING NON-VIOLENT COMMUNICATION SECOND EDITION

Decolonizing Non-Violent Communication is back with a second edition! This second edition has all the original content from the first edition with more to explore. Additions to the original include an intro from Meenadchi, new illustrations by Hana Ward, additional reflection pages to dive deeper into the work, and a body sensations expressions chart.
is a workbook stocked with activities, exercises, and ideas to explore our relationship to communication, our bodies, and each other. Using a trauma-informed approach, this workbook encourages readers to deepen our emotional vocabularies so that we can work towards a more enlivened, healthy interdependence.

Size: 5.5" x 8.5", 92 pages spiral bound. Edition of 5,000.

Self published by Co-Conspirator Press with the support of Feminist Center for Creative Work. Edited by Nicole Kelly. Illustrations and infographics by Hana Ward. Designed by MJ Balvanera. Printed and bound by Procosa in Mexico City, Mexico.

MEENADCHI

workbook
(Meenadchi/they/them) has 10+ years experience in trauma services and crisis stabilization. In December 2018, Meenadchi was invited to become Co-Conspirator Press's inaugural author with the Decolonizing Non-Violent Communication. Meenadchi's DNVC practice lays the groundwork for a somatic approach to unpacking internalized systems of oppression, to divest from shame, and to find radiance and care in our communication.

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Decolonizing Non-Violent Communication is back with a second edition! This second edition has all the original content from the first edition with more to explore. Additions to the original include an intro from Meenadchi, new illustrations by Hana Ward, additional reflection pages to dive deeper into the work, and a body sensations expressions chart.

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The idea was to establish a reflective educational online program on contemporary art practice and theory with international, regional, and local practitioners and scholars. Guided by the principle of building connections, reading, and discussing in Arabic, the program assembled select participants living and working in Gaza over the course of six to eight months in a process-oriented and result-open digital knowledge platform and virtual free space. after the turn - art education beyond the canon tasked the participants with developing a new project or body of work based on the knowledge gained and reflections documented during the program. Work was presented in open-studio critique sessions and will be shown in a group exhibition in the Gaza Strip and abroad.

after the turn was founded in critical practice and endeavored to provide young art practitioners in Gaza with processes for learning and reflecting, agency, and insight on mainstream contemporary art fields. Through practice-led learning, scholars, acting as mentors, supported the program by bringing in their unique and relevant perspectives and inviting guest speakers from around the world to discuss their own experiences and expertise. This approach built a network, stimulated debate among the participants, and engaged in discussions outside Gaza. Informed by decolonial thinking and discourses connected to the Global South, questions around the origins of theories and practices, production mechanisms, utilization, and presentation generated new knowledge specific to the context in which after the turn developed.

The program consisted of three main learning blocks tackling issues of seeing, perceiving, and translating-senses that are compromised or inhibited when under siege. Concerned with representation and knowledge distribution beyond the canon of academic art practice and discourse, each block was realized over the course of eight weeks by one lead mentor in close contact with the participants. The blocks were divided into theoretical and practical parts yet merged them simultaneously, a process led by the participants and initiated through different exercises from the mentors.

Participants were asked to work on reflective journals. The method of reflective learning corresponded with the theoretical position of the participants' situatedness and the knowledge presented and discussed. Crucial to the program's pedagogy, reflective journaling summarized what was learned and exchanged by using symbols and semiotic systems as different research tools in art education. In addition, besides using language as a form of expression, it directed focus to other modes of reflection: material forms of practice, still and moving images, music, sound, live action, and sketching, among others. This method of documentation and learning originated outside the canon and provided the foundation for the participants' group exhibition. Reflective journaling was a crucial tool for drawing connections and disparities and archiving art history in the making.

A fold is never final, [1] 1
Achille Mbembe, Out of the Dark Night: Essays on Decolonization (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021), 89. Mona Kriegler, September 4, 2021
"To be a subject is no longer to act autonomously but to share agency with other subjects that have also lost their autonomy."

What happens when knowledge production and transfer is under siege?

In 2017, I visited Al-Aqsa University in Deir el-Balah in the Gaza Strip to meet with faculty and staff of the art department and find out more about art education there. To this day, it is the only university in Gaza that hosts a program in fine arts, terminating in a bachelor's degree. We spoke about the course curriculum; much had been deleted from the teaching schedule, including courses in figurative and plastic arts. As well as censorship, the lack of accessibility to knowledge, opportunities for sharing modes of production and practices that originate from Gaza, and resources like art supplies, translated texts, and sustainable funding threaten the development of free and critical minds. Missing also are safe spaces for the arts community, cultural professionals, and art students to meet and exchange ideas. Micro-support infrastructures-all voluntary- have emerged and are evolving: Young poets and musicians started a music school for children, and now a youth choir of hundreds has developed. Its founder, Arab Sonunu, told me on a visit to the school that Gaza "needs music as much as food and medicine for survival." Established art collectives set up workshops to share their knowledge with younger Gazans who would like to pursue a professional path in the arts. The Al Buzour feminist theater collective has continued to produce new work despite the bombing of their main performance space and archive. Still, global art colloquy lacks Gaza's voice on local modes of artistic and knowledge production that persist amid these challenges to their survival.

It is under these circumstances that [3] 3 after the turn was initiated and developed over the last three years. It adds to, complements, and fills a void in local art education while providing an alternative to the deleted courses from Al-Aqsa's academic schedule. Designed and put into practice online in 2018, before the pandemic, it has demonstrated that the participants and the Gazan community were significantly ahead of the outside world in making use of the toolkit of virtuality. The situatedness of this new space-time condition of the digital sphere as a platform of the in-between remains the only avenue to transmit, receive, and share knowledge and experiences-to "report from the field"-and thus makes the Gazan participants in after the turn "better researchers or field theorists" on the inseparability between thinking and sensing.
Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, "Fugitive Aesthetics," online seminar (European Graduate School, 2021).

Inspired by the rhizome, a core concern of the program's development was to sustain interconnectedness and community within the field of the arts. In its own way, after the turn sought to counter the ongoing air, sea, and land blockade of Gaza and severe restrictions on movement, mobility, and travel to initiate connections and networks within and beyond Gaza's borders. To continue the botanical metaphor, how might this be achieved if roots are blocked by oppressive obstacles? Once the project launched, the multiplicity of gestures of all involved (jury members Sandi Hilal, Sahar Qawasmi, and Tarek Abou El Fetouh, mentors Oraib Toukan, Kamal Aljafari, and Dirar Kalash, and participants Rehaf Batnaji, Khaled Jarada, Mahmoud Abu Warda, Mahmoud M. Alshaer, Majdal Nateel, Salman Nawati, and Hassan Qoud) showed that much of Gaza's cultural actions are rooted in finding alternative pathways and repertoires around such obstacles. As well, the power dynamics of knowledge and student-teacher relations that after the turn fostered anticipated a shift to horizontality by forming new, nonhierarchical connections that emphasized active participation in decision-making processes and the group's own autonomy and independence.

To know nowadays requires the development of a range of new literacies made necessary by, for instance, changes in writing, in reading, in forms of public representation, in the capacity to interpret images or to work on-screen [...]. Traditional ways of teaching have been changing thanks to a range of new practices and methods enabled by digital environments. [...] Such platforms challenge the very notion of disciplinarity-how to think properly, the right questions to ask, the right method to deploy in addressing those questions. [...] Techno-facilitation of knowledge [...] of innovative project works and collaborative writing is increasingly becoming the norm. The old vertical teacher-student relationship is increasingly being replaced by the idea of a learning community, one in which the teacher gives away control, and learning encompasses the total social experience of students.

To be included in global platforms of presentation was vital for the growth of the seven after the turn participants, who all came from different art disciplines. As a group, they shared both virtual and physical spaces for listening and discussing among themselves and with the mentors and curators of the program. They initiated conversations about their individual practices upon recognizing synergies and symmetries among them. This process has been as meaningful as it has been nurturing.

Temporariness is not simply an effect of life changing rapidly; it also derives from the fact that vast domains of human struggle and achievement are hardly the objects of documentation, archiving, or empirical description-and even less so the objects of satisfactory narrative or interpretive understanding. It has to do with the colossal amount of things we literally do not know.

Artists and artworks from Gaza are rarely included in international art exhibitions or critiqued, reviewed, and referenced. [6] 6
A distinction can be made between artists coming from Gaza and working abroad and those living and producing work in Gaza. The Gaza-based artist groups Elteqa and Shababek have generated greater international interest in work produced in Gaza, but more remains to be done. This is due to Gazan artists' inaccessibility to local means of creative development and the international art system's inaccessibility to Gaza. Exclusion is often the result of a lack of quality in artistic production, which does not demonstrate a lack of potential but perhaps rather a stagnation in practice, a halted development or progression due to a lack of inclusion and connectedness. Thus, it is even more urgent to ensure that artistic practice and new knowledge generation from and in Gaza can evolve and breathe. Access to knowledge, discourses, and radical art educational models outside the academy is a possibility.

The logic of the seesaw - coming into a conversation, Alia Rayyan, September 5, 2021
Finding ways to create conversations outside dominating discourses is an ongoing provocation for me. Since I have been walking alongside art, politics, and education in the Middle East for a while and have had the chance to observe the development of a flourishing art scene in the region over the last twenty years, the imbalance of access to knowledge and acknowledgment and the stereotypical framing of art from the Middle East have become pressing questions. After the initial euphoria of the 2010s, which stemmed from the integration of the Middle Eastern art scene into the international art market, disillusionment soon followed, triggered by the shallowness of the labeling process. This is not the place to talk about the possible co-optation of the scene, but the initial hype around the liberation of art from ideological expectations led to self-centeredness, the parameters of which shaped the development of a new generation of artists.

Those first years of enthusiasm and optimism were supposed to sweep society along with this new energy in the region's art and literary scenes. Instead, we experienced a crash landing that shattered the promise of revolutionary ideas, social change, and intellectual awakening. Although the art scene remained internationally recognized and contributed to discourses through critical debate, it was distant from society, a crisis of meaning caused by the homogenizing expectations of the market. Still, it was urgently necessary to deal with how contemporary art education could obtain its own signature outside Western-dominated art discourse, to find time to pause and reflect.

This search for movement aligns with what Achille Mbembe describes as a decolonization process in education and echoes Frantz Fanon's historical call to bring forth our own stories. It is not about excluding the previous dominant discourses and theories but about speaking on the same level, speaking to each other, and coming into the conversation, as Catherine Walsh describes in "On Decolonial Dangers, Decolonial Cracks, and Decolonial Pedagogies Rising." Accepting fissures and working with them, opening up the discussion, and creating experimentation are some of the exciting possibilities suggested by these thinkers and practitioners.

Gaza has always been an example of this development. Artists experience both extreme stigmatization and the challenge of not being able to participate in discussions at the international level. If they do participate, they risk being framed or treated benevolently, since any art coming from this isolated place must be welcomed and applauded.

When you invited me to brainstorm about a project engaging issues of alternative art education in Gaza, I saw the possibility of picking up a thread that had been dropped years earlier. The conversations we have had since laid the path for the project that emerged: a slowly developing movement, one brave enough to endure without expectations.

It was essential for us to transfer this search for movement into the idea of exchange: to invite artists and interested parties to participate in a program in flux, one that moved up and down in rhythm like a seesaw, constantly aware that it needed a counterpart. So, it was only right to look for mentors who would engage in this movement with the Gazan participants. I remember, in the beginning, the search for suitable participants; we looked for artists, students, and musicians who were open to becoming involved in the experiment. We guided the applicants to make videos to counteract the usual selection process based on written presentations and portfolios. This proved to be a good move, but it also meant that we set the bar very high compared to the admissions practices of art academies. How selection procedures took place was and is a constant topic, which we had discussed intensively with the very high-ranking and committed jury members, all well-known in the regional and international art scene.

All three were enthusiastic about applicants who had previously attracted little or no attention in the local discourse. In a relatively small art scene like Palestine's, it is not unusual to know or have heard of all new artists. But I remember the intense discussion, which demonstrated the degree to which we were influenced by certain attitudes at art academies and the conditions of competition that the application process so often entails. Our program was supposed to circumvent this and offer a different, safe space in which an open exchange could take place. A way of setting out together, without having to abide by or be exposed to academic prescriptions. A free space that takes place beyond the canon.

Even though we have presented a specific framework for the program, it then resembled a sketch, a draft. Therein lay the possibility of meeting the pressing concerns with openness, inclusion, and endurance.

Reflection through relation, Mona Kriegler, September 6, 2021
Once the participants formed bonds around their different disciplines, materials, and works of art, the constituent parts of after the turn started to be in the conversation. The program became a collective process thereafter through weekly in-person meetings in a newly opened cultural space in a historical house from the mid-nineteenth century.

An important matter right from the start was your idea to integrate reflective journaling as a form of documentation. Each participant noted down flashes of knowledge learned, experiences, ideas, and thoughts encountered in the development of the program, and the voices of mentors and other participants. How the journal pages were filled was based on individual and experimental freedoms. What happened and is still developing among the group reminds me of Édouard Glissant's Poetics of Relation: a multiplicity of languages, not just of the spoken word, different forms of language set in relation with one another: thinking, reflective journaling, and documenting. Engaging in discussions with the group now about their exhibition this autumn, which includes their individual artistic productions and a collective work, sheds light on their different articulations and empowers a newly established network that would not have grown roots otherwise. This agency and creativity call for recognition beyond the canon (from which it was already excluded) and for the extension of the group's reflections through sustained relations. Gaza and the cultural activity there are not peripheral to a center but rather one periphery of a sphere without a center, or even, as Glissant reminds us, a sphere where peripheries no longer exist.

The aspect of translation, as we discussed from the program's start, has been vital. Yet, what texts will be translated, discussed, taught, and learned if certain texts dominate over those unwritten or hidden? Contextualizing is a common strategy in translation, in theoretical and practical approaches, but what does it mean? What does it mean to translate theories according to a specific understanding of local social and political circumstances? Do theories change in new contexts? Stuart Hall emphasized that "translation is a continuous process of re-articulation and re-contextualization without any notion of a primary origin." Theories, however, are embedded in geopolitical power relations that dominate the present academic and art discourses. This tendency still creates homogenized approaches and asymmetrical knowledge distribution within the canon. This program was and continues to be about exploring what lies beyond that canon: participants have discussed and related concepts of translational theory and practice by reading selected works (theories, films, artworks) against the grain and applying reflective practice to their bodies of work and trains of thought. There is the "need to embrace multivocality and translation as a way to avoid perpetuating the knowledge and power asymmetries that currently fracture global humanity [...]. In this model, knowledge of the empirical world is thought to be gained through the embrace of multiplicity, of a plurality of narratives from silenced voices and invisible places."

Observing a turning point, Alia Rayyan, September 7, 2021
Glissant's Poetics of Relation recalls the essence of after the turn very well-the rhythm between participants and mentors, between us, and among the group as a body. Closeness and openness in the program coincided with confinement that the world at large had not yet experienced but that Gaza was already familiar with. It seemed somehow ironic when discussing working under siege that the pandemic suddenly sent the world into lockdown. The isolation that so many people still struggle with today changed ways of working and living and unexpectedly led to an understanding of a state in which some things are always unreachable and inaccessible. The search for other forms of sharing despite constraints was thus given a boost or perhaps a sense of urgency or focus. I remember our discussion about the digital sphere as a new non-place-didn't you have an article you liked on this?

Making place again, Mona Kriegler, September 10, 2021
The notion of non-places was formulated by Marc Augé to address states of transience and anonymity accelerated due to globalization and supermodernity. The virtual sphere added another dimension to this idea and, in the context of Gaza's air, sea, and land blockade (and the pandemic), it became the only place to meet and connect. Mark Fisher expanded on this notion and introduced the idea of "no time," the sense that the "accelerated rate of technological development has actually had a slowing effect on cultural development." Might after the turn then be an antidote to non-places and no time?

The virtual space in which the group met was intimate and safe. It was their private meeting room in cyberspace, yet the program is defined by its hybrid character, too. With time, sessions became more and more personal, which was created not only by how the mentors engaged with the participants but also by the group itself. The artists shared insights into their processes of producing and thinking. The act of listening was vital not only for reflexive journaling but also paved the way for in-person weekly Saturday meetings to think together about the after the turn exhibition, which will be presented at the Al-Ghussein House. This occurred alongside Oraib Toukan's online reading group, which was formed out of the first seminar block and has continued since. A sense of care has emerged, and the relationships among participants have grown in a rhizomatic way. New roots have emerged through a new collective platform for individual and collective presentation, don't you think?

Turning, Alia Rayyan, September 12, 2021
It is surely a more affirmative interpretation of the non-place, one born from necessity and in correspondence with reality. But if we go back to Augé's original interpretation, it does describe our program: the possibility that any place can be called a non-place or a crossroads of human relationships, depending on the position of the subject. However, I believe that there are two key things that align here that make our non-place a place of gathering and closeness. First, it addressed on several levels the specific "out-of-place" situation of artists in Gaza. Second, it spoke to the part of Palestinian identity that is outside the global nation-state system, which entails a degree of non-placeness that every Palestinian knows and can refer to, regardless of their current living situation. This is a quality shared by all the actors in after the turn. A kind of interiorized outside and embodied memory that turns the non-place into a meeting place.

The dominance of scientific language that regulates access to knowledge remains an issue. Finding common ground through texts, sounds, or images, through sharpening the senses and relearning was essential. Though we were not part of the group sessions, the mentors offered glimpses of what this process looked like. For example, close reading texts offered a way to discuss backgrounds for artists' writing, the genesis of theories, the juxtaposition of individual experiences, and the question of translations and the consequences to be drawn from them. Another cross-connection was built between the effects of hearing and seeing on perception.

For this program, in general, two pedagogical approaches were critical. First, the exchange with other artists and filmmakers across generations and locations. And second, the learning, discussing, and advancing in thinking and seeing together. The mentors played an essential role here. And it was, I think, also this kaleidoscope of Palestinian artists and filmmakers that made each meeting so exciting. Each of the mentors brought their own appreciative system-a whole person/body/self/mind/history-that reflected the diversity of biographies and geographies of working Palestinian artists. Amman, Ramallah, Jaffa, Berlin, Rome, Jerusalem, Gaza. It created a closeness that transcended the digital and physical distance we all experienced during the pandemic. I was particularly moved by the closeness and intensity of collaboration that emerged despite this digital chill. Based on the reflective journaling, different appreciative systems, above all, stimulated learning based on experience. In agreeing and differing, listening and finding common ground, change and mutual learning may develop free from hierarchical impositions.

The rupture of the war on Gaza in May 2021 not only halted our work but also created a new speechlessness and exhaustion that had to be dealt with. This happened naturally, in the last block of the program, on the topic of sound. Following Oraib's close readings of texts with the participants and Kamal Al Jafari's leading them in new ways of seeing their immediate surroundings, Dirar Karresh engaged with sound in all its nuances and suggestions and triggers to open up a new dimension of experience and perception.

The end of the digital sessions was also the beginning of finding ways to collaborate after the program's end. The participants primarily met in digital space, even though they all knew each other in real space as they all live in Gaza. However, it was the digital space, the fixed ritual of meeting, that provided a rhythm for continuing. The transition to an "after" was made by exiting the digital and entering a real place, but one outside daily routines.

The program's second cycle, its expansion and continuation, began at Al-Ghussein House, the newly renovated historic building in the middle of the destroyed city of Gaza that was converted into a free cultural center by Goethe-Institut. In November, a show at the Al-Ghussein House will tell of the unspeakable of the non-places and stage another translation of after the turn 's process, of the becoming and of the beauty of seeing each other in the real world. Moving the conversation into a physical space reveals that this direct contact is always somewhat ahead of the digital, even if it can reveal new dimensions of learning when combined with the digital. However, without the concentration that digital proximity allowed through simultaneous de-spatialization, the quality of the real exchanges on site between the participants would not have reached its peak.

From my point of view, however, the most exciting thing about this process is the open-endedness that characterizes the flux of thoughts, reflections, and discussions. In this sense, the program was an attempt to practice the idea of decanonization-a "dismantling of hierarchical structures that the canon produces by de-erasure," as Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung writes. Following the goal of creating skills to "re-emerge, re-write, and re-articulate," we pursued a practice that was in relation to what surrounded us and gave space for debate and discourse beyond the canon. The title after the turn alludes to this attempt. It is not a U-turn but a moving on, an attempt to exceed preexisting limits.

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after the turn: Decolonial and Noncanonical Learning in Gaza - School Watch - Art & Education

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The idea was to establish a reflective educational online program on contemporary art practice and theory with international, regional, and local practitioners and scholars. Guided by the principle of building connections, reading, and discussing in Arabic, the program assembled select participants living and working in Gaza over the course of six to eight months in a process-oriented and result-open digital knowledge platform and virtual free space.

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Silence is a Commons by Ivan Illich Computers are doing to communication what fences did to pastures and cars did to streets. by Ivan Illich Minna-san, gladly I accept the honour of addressing this forum on Science and Man. The theme that Mr. Tsuru proposes, "The Computer-Managed Society," sounds an alarm.

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Ecoversities Alliance: a five-year experiment in cosmpolitical learning

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– Akwugo Emejulu, Professor of Sociology, University of Warwick

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Verso Books is the largest independent, radical publishing house in the English-speaking world.

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In Dear Science and Other Stories Katherine McKittrick presents a creative and rigorous study of black and anticolonial methodologies. Drawing on black studies, studies of race, cultural geography, and black feminism as well as a mix of methods, citational practices, and theoretical frameworks, she positions black storytelling and stories as strategies of invention and collaboration. She analyzes a number of texts from intellectuals and artists ranging from Sylvia Wynter to the electronica band Drexciya to explore how narratives of imprecision and relationality interrupt knowledge systems that seek to observe, index, know, and discipline blackness. Throughout, McKittrick offers curiosity, wonder, citations, numbers, playlists, friendship, poetry, inquiry, song, grooves, and anticolonial chronologies as interdisciplinary codes that entwine with the academic form. Suggesting that black life and black livingness are, in themselves, rebellious methodologies, McKittrick imagines without totally disclosing the ways in which black intellectuals invent ways of living outside prevailing knowledge systems.

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In Dear Science and Other Stories Katherine McKittrick presents a creative and rigorous study of black and anticolonial methodologies. Drawing on black studies, studies of race, cultural geography, and black feminism as well as a mix of methods, citational practices, and theoretical frameworks, she positions black storytelling and stories as strategies of invention and collaboration.

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Gesturing Towards	Decolonial Futures Global Citizenship Otherwise Study Program

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A Practical Guide to Stop Interpersonal Violence

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What follows are excerpts from a project I am calling Rooting into the Planthroposcene. Taking the impossible and near comedic form of a step-by-step guide to getting out of the Anthropocene, this project picks up recent calls for inventive forms of speculative fabulation. This form does well to channel both my rage about our current predicament, and my playful and loving - if also serious - aspirations for dreaming worlds otherwise.

Just to prepare you for what follows: this is not so much a research paper, as it is an incantation. We have to remember that we are living under a spell, and this spell is destroying our worlds. It's time to cast another spell, to call other worlds into being, to conjure other worlds within this world. It is clear that the situation we find ourselves in now leaves us at the limits of language, and grasping at the edges of imagination. We need art, experiment and radical disruption to learn other ways to see, feel and know.

Consider this as an invitation to experiment with ways of dreaming life differently.

Step 1 | Never forget this: "we" are not "one"

Say it again. And again. We cannot forget to keep asking: Precisely who is hailed by this Anthropos, that figure positioned at the helm of the Anthropocene? Anthropocenic rhetoric calls out "Man" as the agent of his own demise and simultaneously vaults him into position as the only viable saviour of the planet: "We got ourselves into this mess. We alone can get us out."

Even as Anthropocenic thinking attempts to call our attention to - and finally hold us responsible for - the egregious effects of our actions, it still figures humans as a singular agent, transcendent over and separate from some Edenic nature in peril. These narratives re-centre rather than de-centre Man as the agent with natural dominion over this planet's future.

Do not get distracted by the misplaced concreteness of scientific efforts to articulate the physical markers and temporal boundaries of a geological era made by humans. What we are witnessing is the apotheosis of five hundred years of colonial violence, extractive capitalism, white supremacy and the hubris of human exceptionalism. The Capitalocene and the Plantationocene are apt monikers to identify the forces that have long been at work terraforming the planet. These destructive forces are propelled, not by all people, but by those particularly egregious ways of doing life modelled on self-aggrandising Man.

Remember this: not all are hailed by this figure or form of life. Capitalism and colonialism are not to be mistaken as natural or innate to human existence. They are not inevitable consequences of human evolution or civilisation. But they are the condition of our current predicament. Marisol de la Cadena calls our attention to those Anthropo-not-seen, those whose lives and lands continue to be spent in the accumulation of wealth by colonial and neocolonial powers. These are the people who remain targets of dispossession and attempted annihilation even - perhaps especially - today as capitalism gets into high gear in its efforts to "go green" and "save the world." Don't believe the hype of sustainability rhetoric. The worlds built by colonialism and capitalism are unliveable for us all.

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Step 2 | Break this world to make other worlds possible

There is no way to "mitigate" Anthropocenic violence using Anthropocene logics. Refuse calls to design for the Anthropocene. Such designs are precisely the "technological fixes" that will keep us locked into the same rhythms of extraction and dispossession. Refuse to be lured into those climate change edutainment complexes, those gleaming glass, metal and concrete infrastructures whose capital- and labour-intensive designs exquisitely expose the ruse of sustainability as an aesthetic manoeuvre grounded in Edenic visions of nature. That is not the kind of green that will save us.

Yes, there are apocalypses already ongoing all around us. The decimation of the Boreal forest to extract bitumen on stolen Indigenous land in Canada is one such apocalypse. But giving in to apocalyptic thinking is itself a kind of exit strategy, an easy out. Ruin porn, including those all-too compelling images of plants rupturing through abandoned buildings in Detroit and Chernobyl, thrives on this narrative of "a world without us." The earth will be better off without people, so we are told. Beware of such apocalyptic thinking. Anthropocenic thought catches you up in thrall of apocalypse and sets us all to work, furtively dreaming the end of times.

We must refuse what Donna Haraway calls the "tragic detumescence" of a narrative arc that is bent on pulling the entire planet toward unstoppable catastrophe. Do not be swayed into thinking that this is how it has to go down, as if apocalypse is precisely what will have been. What futures are we setting in motion with all our apocalyptic rhetoric?

Resist the lure of apocalypse like your life depends on it. Yes, it's easier to dream the end of the world than the end of capitalism, but the only way to thwart the momentum of the Anthropocene is to break capitalism and activate processes of decolonisation. And while it is clearly time to dismantle Anthropocene logic, there is no need to wait until the end of this world to begin to conjure liveable ones. As Stuart McLean reminds us, there are as yet other worlds in this world. And there are, as yet, worlds to come. But which worlds will be liveable? And what makes a liveable world?

Step 3 | Repeat this mantra: We are not alone. We are not alone. We are not alone ...

Looking back at the past five hundred years of efforts to assert Western Man's independence from - and power over - nature, it is clear that we should never be trusted to act alone. Anthropocene thinking is so obsessed with Man's independence, with unilateral action and autonomy, that it forgets that there are other forces and powers among us, including those with significantly better skills in the realm of world-making and planetary-scale change. In some cases, these beings have billions of years more experience than us in terraforming liveable worlds.

Step 4 | Name our most powerful ally

Who made this planet liveable and breathable for animals like us? Say it out loud: the photosynthetic ones - photosynthetic organisms form a biogeochemical force of a magnitude we have not yet properly grasped. More than two billion years ago, photosynthetic microbes spurred the event known today as the oxygen catastrophe, or the great oxidation. These creatures dramatically altered the composition of the atmosphere, choking out the ancient anaerobic ones with poisonous oxygen vapours. If we were to continue to fall into the trap of naming linear, time-bound eras after singular agents, we might be rattled to think that we are living in the wake of what should have been called the " Phytocene. "

Photosynthesisers, like cyanobacteria, algae, terrestrial plants and trees, are the planet's most powerful agents of elemental rearrangement. The science of photosynthesis, with its calculative metrics bent on extracting value from green beings, is too mired in the logic of naturalised capital. These green beings must be understood otherwise; that is, as practitioners of a kind of alchemical, cosmic mattering. We think plants can't move, but they reach out across the cosmos, drawing the energy of the sun into their tissues so that they can work their terrestrial magic. Pulling matter out of thin air, plants must be understood as world-making conjurers. They teach us the most nuanced lessons about matter and mattering.

More powerful than any industrial plant, communities of photosynthetic creatures rearrange the elements on a planetary scale. They know how to compose liveable, breathable, nourishing worlds. As they exhale, they compose the atmosphere; as they decompose, they matter the compost and feed the soil. Holding the earth down and the sky up, they sing in nearly audible ultrasonic frequencies as they transpire, moving massive volumes of water from the depths of the earth up to the highest clouds. They cleanse the waters and nourish all other life. And for those caught up in the thrall of an economy that fetishises carbon, perhaps the most important art these creatures practice is sucking up, with gusto, the gaseous carbon emissions we humans generate so abundantly.

To say that forests and marine microbes form the "lungs of the earth" is an understatement. They literally breathe us into being. All cultures turn around plants' metabolic rhythms. Plants are the substance, substrate, scaffolding, symbol, sign and sustenance of political economies the world over. We must learn how to work with and for the plants so that we can be nourished and clothed and sheltered and pleasured and healed - without destroying the earth.

Plants are the world-makers we need to heed if we hope to grow liveable worlds. And our worlds will only be liveable worlds when people learn how to conspire with the plants.

Step 5 | Foment Plant/People Conspiracies to Root into the Planthroposcene

Repeat this again and again: We are of the plants. Now, if this is true, then the figure that should ground our actions is not the self-aggrandising Anthropos so much as a strangely hybrid figure we could call the Planthropos. And now try wrapping your mouth around this word until it rolls off your tongue with ease: Planthroposcene. (Yes, it's awkward and you will sound silly. But just give it a try.) The Planthroposcene names an aspirational episteme, not a timebound era, one that invites us to stage new scenes and new ways to see and seed plant/people relations in the here and now, not some distant future. And it is grounded in the wisdom of the ancient and ongoing radical solidarity projects that plants have already cultivated with their many people.

Rather than circumscribing the terrors we face now, the Planthroposcene is an invitation to root ourselves into a way of doing life that would break the frame of Anthropocene logic. The Planthroposcene acknowledges the joint and uncertain futures of plants and peoples and demands we change the terms of encounter so that we can become allies to these green beings. Anthropologist Tim Choy makes a powerful call for the formation of a conspiracy of breathers. His is an aspirational politics in which people learn how to con-spire, that is to breathe together, in order to fight against the atmospheric effects of what Michelle Murphy calls industrial exuberance. He helps us to think conspiracy otherwise, not as a sinister association, but as the grounds for a liveable politics. It is time to extend his call for a conspiracy of breathers to include the plants. That is, we need to learn not just how to collaborate, but also how to conspire with the plants, to breathe with them. Remember, they breathed us into being.

Remember this: what is good for plants is good for everyone else. Get on their side. Consider yourself at their service. Get to know plants intimately and on their terms. And be sure to tap into their desires for forms of life that are not for us. Support their efforts to keep the earth cool and the waters cleansed. Give plants and their soils space and time to flourish outside of the rhythms of capitalist extraction and the chemical violence of industrial agriculture. Remember: they need their pollinators; they need their fungal relations; they need their animal allies.

Above all, they need us to radically reconfigure how we stage our relations with them. Indeed, if plants are sun worshipers, perhaps we ought to be plant worshipers. A little reverence for the plants could go a long way. Invent rituals. Practice permaculture with the witches. Start a local church for plant worship. Don't worry: reverence for plants doesn't mean you can't eat them. But it does mean it would be polite to thank them for their generosity. Just think: if you had to consult the plants to ask permission to use them, industrial agriculture, strip mining, clear-cutting and the expanding concrete of urban sprawl would be inconceivable. Just ask, they will tell you.

Step 6 | Disrupt colonial common sense

Decolonisation means giving stolen lands back to Indigenous peoples. And decolonisation demands we reckon with and dismantle the overt and covert ways that settler states are structured on white supremacy, slavery, and the erasures of existing Land/body relations through fantasies of Terra Nullius. Perhaps one step towards decolonisation would require that we disrupt our all-too colonial imaginations. To do this, we would need to upend everything we believe is common sense.

Does talking to plants sound crazy to you? Consider this: for millennia, and still to this day, people all over the world cultivate intimate relationships with plants. Many have come to know plants' powers and predilections, especially those whose lives and livelihoods get them tangled up with the plants and caught in their spiralling whorl. There are gardeners, farmers, hunters, healers, herbalists, cooks, artists, naturalists, foresters, scientists and shamans all over the world who consider plants as sentient beings worthy of address. Lots of people hear plants sing, though not necessarily in the audible registers you might anticipate.

And at the same time, many people - perhaps even you - would think this is absurd. Sure, you read that story about plants in your Facebook feed: "Science has confirmed that plant roots have a kind of swarm intelligence ..." But we don't need the disenchanting sciences of plant sensing to tell us what plant people have long known. What we do need to do is make strange the disenchantment and scepticism we have inherited from those whose power was secured in part through sciences designed to invalidate all other ways of knowing the world. It was the colonisers, of course, who refused to believe local and Indigenous people's claims that the plants can sing.

Don't forget that human exceptionalism is another colonial formation, one that violently evacuates the liveliness and sentience of the more-than-human world around us. It's time to detune our colonial sensorium. To do this, we would need to upend everything we believed was common sense. Forget everything you thought you knew about the living world, especially what you believe is perceptible, imaginable, reasonable, legible and meaningful. Refuse the disenchantments of a mechanistic science that renders more-than-human worlds in the form of alienable bits of life and death ready to be portioned off as property, resource, or commodity. Sideline colonial and capitalist moral economies that dictate what is good, valuable and true - especially those that naturalise economic growth and extraction as the work that is proper to Man.

Refuse to discipline or deride local and Indigenous cosmologies. Push back on every contortion or erasure or reduction of their knowledge that seeks to make such practices legible or commensurable or rational to science. Do not appropriate Indigenous knowledges, but do the work to make yourself receptive and responsive so that you can take these knowledges seriously. Make space for other ways of knowing and storying the living world. Remember: there are people all over the world who have the protocols, the know-how and the responsibility to consult the plants. Liveable worlds need people who know how to talk to the plants.

Step 7 | Vegetalise your sensorium

Once you have set in motion efforts to decolonise your common sense, it is time to vegetalise your sensorium so that you, too, can learn with and alongside the plants. As a co-conspirator supporting their world-making projects, you will need to apprentice with them. What do plants want? What do plants know? What can a plant do? We do not yet know. But you could reach toward them with the openness of not knowing, and forget what you thought counts as knowledge.

Consider this: your sensorium, especially your senses of colour, texture, taste, touch and smell, is already articulated by plant life. Their forms inspire your aesthetics, entrain your habitus and excite your imagination. From this perspective, it is clear that your senses are already vegetalised. And yet there is still much work do to learn how to extend your synesthetic sensorium to meet their lively worlds.

In order to awaken the latent plant in you, you will need to get interested in the things that plants care about. Though plants don't have eyes, ears, noses or mouths, don't be fooled - they can see, hear, smell, taste and feel. Let their planty sensitivities inflect your own. Tune into the different ways they do time, learn to follow their tempos and rhythms. Pay attention to the ways they defy all-too-human notions of individuality, bodily integrity, subjectivity and agency. Let the plants redefine what you mean by the terms "sensing," "sensitivity" and "sentience." Let yourself be lured by their tropic turns, and you will soon acquire freshly vegetalised sensory dexterities.

You can also activate the latent plant in you through incantations, hypnosis, meditation or yoga. Try cultivating your inner plant through meditation. Vegetalisation is possible because your body does not end at the skin. Your contours are not constrained by physical appearance. Your morphological imaginary is fluid and changeable. Indeed, your tissues can absorb all kinds of fantasies. Your imagination generates more than mere mental images; its reach extends through your entire sensorium. Simultaneously visual and kinaesthetic, imaginings carry an affective charge. They can excite your muscles, tissues, and fascia, heighten or alter your senses. You can fold semiosis into sensation. Perceptual experiments can rearticulate your sensorium. And by imagining otherwise, and telling different stories, you can open up new sensible worlds.

If that doesn't work, let the plants work directly on you. Cannabis and Ayahuasca have been great allies for those seeking to palpate the sentience of the more-than-human world. But above all, involve yourself with plant life. Make space for plants to take root, and take the time to watch them grow. Linger among them and let their sentiences and sensibilities alter your perception, how you think, how and what you know.

Step 8 | Take ecology off the grid

Once you have decolonised your imagination and vegetalised your sensorium, the world will look and feel a lot different. You may begin to sense things you have never perceived before. You may get the feeling that you are being watched everywhere you go. Indeed, the plants and trees are not indifferent to you: they are paying very close attention to all the beings that ingather around them. They know how to lure you and their other co-conspirators with force.

Start with the plants, follow their inquisitive growth, their running roots and rhizomes, the widespread movements of their pollen and seeds, and an entire ecology of beings and becomings and comings undone will soon become perceptible. Get caught up in the involutionary momentum that propels these beings into one another's lives and you will soon start to perceive affective ecologies taking shape among the thicket of relations all around you.

Cultivate modes of attention that allow you to perceive what matters to the plants and their co-conspirators. Becoming sensor, tune into this ecology of practices and practitioners. Follow the push and pull, the attractions and repulsions, the happenings taking shape in and around the plants. Get a feel for the ways that plants practice their arts at the cusp of life and death. With time you will begin to detune your colonial ecological sensorium, and new worlds will open up into view.

Develop protocols for an ungrid-able ecology - a mode of inquiry that refuses the colonialism, militarism, heteronormativity and economisation of life that grounds conventional ecology. Resist desires for legibility and statistical generalisability. Refuse attempts to calculate an ecology's energetic efficiencies or apply cost-benefit analyses. Invalidate metrics that would parse ecological relations into mechanical parts. Break all automatic, prefabricated sensors.

Over time you will begin to forget what you used to think "nature" was; you will forget how you used to think life "worked"; and eventually you will forget, too, the naturalising tropes that made you believe that living beings "work" like machines, or that forests perform "ecosystems services," or that "reproduction" and "fitness" were the only valuable and recordable measures of a life. Confront the colonial and capitalist desires of the ecological sciences. Say no to conventional ecology's exacting metrics that justify an extractive ecology indebted to expansion and dispossession. Beware of Anthropocene ecologies that reduce land-care practices to resource management. Do ecology otherwise.

Decolonising ecology means restoring Indigenous stewardship to stolen lands. In the Planthroposcene, colonial governments must cede control over land management and make space for Indigenous people to bring ceremony and healing to their lands and bodies. The raging fires currently incinerating Australia and California are a direct result of colonial dispossession and the suppression of Indigenous fire practices. Indigenous knowledge keepers have the know how to conspire with fire to grow liveable and nourishing worlds. The remnant oak savannahs in California and around the Great Lakes, for example, were made over millennia by Indigenous people bringing fire to lands and plant communities that thrive on fire. Indigenous land stewardship is a form of harm reduction and climate action. These are the plant-people conspiracies that will save us.

Step 9 | Garden against Eden

Forget everything you thought a garden was. And everything you thought a gardener was supposed to do. Your job in the Planthroposcene is to stage plant/people conspiracies to keep this planet liveable and breathable. Your primary commitment will be to support plant growth. Everywhere. Start by letting the plants grow where they want to: let them break through the concrete; root into every fissure and surface; grow through the holes in every fence.

Don't be afraid of the plants. Remember, those plants we vilify as " invasive species" are here to teach us about the ravages of colonialism. The plants themselves are not evil. They grow where lands have been destroyed. They grow on sites of dispossession. They grow where lands and bodies are out of relation. Before we poison the earth with pesticides to eradicate non-native plants, we need to ask ourselves what they are they up to? What are they teaching us about colonisation and the ruins of capitalism?

The Planthroposcene uproots the infrastructures of our Anthropocenic cities founded on Edenic desires of a nature tamed and contained by Man. Give those old-order infrastructures back to the plants and the fungi; let them decompose. Wild urban plant growth certainly does portend the decline of Empire, but in the Planthroposcene, wild growth will not be read as a sign of ruin. Planthroposcenic cities will be designed to support plant life everywhere. Each surface will offer an affordance, a place for plants to root and grow and decompose. Perhaps one day you will conspire with the plants to grow your own home. Perhaps cities will grow themselves into cooling forests, brimming with nourishment.

In the Planthroposcene, radical farmers like those at the Land Institute in Kansas will have succeeded in dismantling industrial agriculture by conspiring with the plants to bring back the plains, growing perennial grains in the form of regenerating grasslands. These lands will demand the return of the buffalo; they will resist erosion, retain water, activate soil microbes, and reject heavy machinery and chemical fertilisers. As such they will set the stage for new kinds of social and political relations. In the Planthroposcene, the capitalist imperative to grow economies will be subverted and supplanted by the imperative to give plants the time and space they need to grow, to freely articulate relations with their allies, and express their fullest desires. Humans will have to cede their biopolitical powers over lands and bodies. We will no longer be in control.

Step 10 | Make art for the Planthroposcene

Refuse the aesthetics of ruin porn, which constrains our imaginations about wild growth to sites of cultural decay, as if it is only in the wake of human extinction that plants will be able to express their full, unfettered (read: monstrous) powers. Cultivate, instead, a taste for Planthroposcene porn: art that keeps people in the game by staging intimate relations between plants and people; art that figures "nature as lover, not mother"; art that lures us into the realm of more-than-human pleasures. Curate your own EcoSexual Bathhouse and make love with the plants. Join Slovenian artist Špela Petrič and the Plant Sex Consultancy to design vibrators for lonely potted plants and flowers that have lost their pollinators.

Activate your own capacity for cosmic mattering by learning Chimera Rosa's protocols to tattoo your skin with chlorophyll. You too can learn how to photosynthesise. Join artists from Dance for Plants to create performances for the potted plants that are slow dancing on the window ledges of your apartment. Apprentice with Mexican artist Gilberto Esparza to design lively nomadic plant companions. Build the bodies of your planimal-machines from electronic waste harvested from the ruins of capitalism, and engineer them to draw their energy from bacterial life, so that when they suck up raw sewage downstream from toxic industrial flows, they can transform it into water that supports plants and their allies.

Whatever you do, conspire with the plants to make art like your life depends on disrupting the colonial common sense that would leave us all to die in the Anthropocene.
Natasha Myers is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at York University, Toronto. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram. An earlier version of this article appeared in The World to Come: Art in the Age of the Anthropocene, published by the Harn Museum of Art at the University of Florida.

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How to grow liveable worlds - ABC Religion & Ethics

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Anthropocene thinking and rhetoric are so obsessed with Man's independence that they forget there are other forces and powers among us. Plants are the world-makers we need to heed if we hope to grow liveable worlds. And our worlds will only be liveable worlds when people learn how to conspire with the plants.

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To Navigate Backward: Resonating with Zapatismo a book-within-a-book, the first of three mouvements (as in a musical composition) is a collection of essays titled When the Roots Start Moving: Chto Delat and Free Home University -investigating predicaments of rootedness and rootlessness and notions of belonging and of displacement across different geographical and epistemological coordinates.

Zapatismo-the insurgent movement of Indigenous peoples from Mexico-emerges as a form of belonging, a home (or a homecoming) for our hopes and political imaginaries, providing a praxis to learn from and with. The contributors of this book, without romanticizing or objectifying the Zapatista struggle toward Autonomy, offer their understanding of the Zapatistas' movement, of their poetics and politics within an Indigenous cosmovision and cosmopolitics, but also in relation with the current global ecological and social crises.

The book extend the research and practice of artistic collective Chto Delat, long since adopting Zapatismo as a lens to self-reflect and emblematically reminding of how the Zapatista imaginary continues to inspire those who are looking for emancipatory tools: through art, language, radical pedagogy and conviviality, as a practice of commoning and collectively reimagining an otherwise.

To Navigate Backward: Resonating with Zapatismo is a small act of reciprocity-in preparation for the Zapatistas' visit to the European continent, a gesture of solidarity with those who, with fierce care, leave their homes to reverse imposed trajectories, to look in the same direction and share a common horizon.

The conversation hosted in this book by Free Home University will continue in the following two mouvements-Between Displacement and Belonging and Motherlands/Mother Earth.

Chto Delat is a group of artists, philosophers, activists, and writers founded in St. Petersburg in 2003 with the goal of merging art with political theory and practice. In 2013, they initiated The School of Engaged Art, an educational platform, and the autonomous space Rosa House of Culture.

Free Home University exists at the crossroad of engaged art, experimental pedagogy, and political commitment since 2014. FHU has been carrying out artistic investigations and processes of convivial research, engaging with communities of struggle and practice. Artists, farmers, activists, asylum seekers, scholars, thinkers and doers collectively inform learning spaces, through living, studying, and creating together.

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Resonating with Zapatismo - Archive Books

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To Navigate Backward: Resonating with Zapatismo a book-within-a-book, the first of three mouvements (as in a musical composition) is a collection of essays titled When the Roots Start Moving: Chto Delat and Free Home University-investigating predicaments of rootedness and rootlessness and notions of belonging and of displacement across different geographical and epistemological coordinates.

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This publication is a record, an imagination, a memory, an encounter, a dreamtime, a provocation for ideas, a food for thought, an insight into Foresta Seasonal Academy trails and works shared by participants through the collective journey, an invitation to play, to sense, to think, to co-create,to join the conversations.

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Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples is a book by Linda Tuhiwai Smith. Originally published in 1999, Decolonizing Methodologies is a seminal text in indigenous studies that explores the intersections of colonialism and research methodologies.

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Ninawa Huni Kui keynote speech for Imagine 4.7 global event hosted by the Bridge 47 project

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What I Mean By Postactivism • Writings – Bayo Akomolafe

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What am I talking about when I talk about “postactivism”?

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Climate change, economic injustice, systemic racism...it seems like so much is going wrong right now. In this podcast, author, activist, and host Vicki Robin asks cultural scouts a single question: what could possibly go right? Our guests' insightful answers and the short, deep-dive conversations that ensue, can help all of us see more clearly, act more courageously, and better serve the common good.

We get to talk with the most interesting people on the podcast. Host Vicki Robin has had conversations with activists, journalists, musicians, authors, and ecologists. Listen to the podcast to hear what each of them sees on the horizon for what could possibly go right.

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What Could Possibly Go Right? Podcast with Vicki Robin

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Climate change, economic injustice, systemic racism...it seems like so much is going wrong right now. In this podcast, author, activist, and host Vicki Robin asks cultural scouts a single question: what could possibly go right? Our guests' insightful answers and the short, deep-dive conversations that ensue, can help all of us see more clearly, act [...]

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The first essay in this book was amazing, but I ended up setting it down and getting wrapped up in schoolwork before I could finish it, and now it's in Illinois, and I'm in California. But the first piece is an amazing look at the essentially colonizing act of American corporations and scientific knowledge on Indian agriculture and indigenous knowledge. ...more

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The first essay in this book was amazing, but I ended up setting it down and getting wrapped up in schoolwork before I could finish it, and now it's in Illinois, and I'm in California. But the first piece is an amazing look at the essentially colonizing act of American corporations and scientific knowledge on Indian agriculture and indigenous knowledge.

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Joyful Militancy investigates how fear, self-righteousness, and moralism infiltrate and take root within liberation movements, what to do about them, and ultimately how tenderness and vulnerability can thrive alongside fierce militant commitment.

Why do radical movements and spaces sometimes feel laden with fear, anxiety, suspicion, self-righteousness, and competition? Montgomery and bergman call this phenomenon rigid radicalism: congealed and toxic ways of relating that have seeped into social movements, posing as the "correct" way of being radical. In conversation with organizers and intellectuals from a wide variety of political currents, the authors explore how rigid radicalism smuggles itself into radical spaces, and how it is being undone

Interviewees include Silvia Federici, adrienne maree brown, Marina Sitrin, Gustavo Esteva, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Walidah Imarisha, Margaret Killjoy, Glen Coulthard, Richard Day, and more.

Praise for Joyful Militancy

"The resurgence of the reactionary right has led many on the left to feel overwhelming despair. Resisting the rising tide of dread, this unique, genre-bending book offers a spirited defense of a militant politics of joy-an affirmative theory of openness and experimentation, curiosity and questioning. This is a thought-provoking, morale-boosting, hope-inspiring tonic offered at the moment we need it most."
- Astra Taylor, author of The People's Platform and co-founder of The Debt Collective

"Combining humility, deep insight and open, liberatory theoretical foundations Joyful Militancy importantly, and accessibly, asks hard questions and challenges the rigid culture within activism and social movements that need it. Instead with open hearts and minds the pages within offer thoughts for liberatory openings, not more answers, for all of us to explore within ourselves to radically engage in shifts from rigidity towards joy with sharp edges. This book kicks ass!"
- scott crow, author, Black Flags and Windmills and Emergency Hearts, Molotov Dreams

"People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about Joyful Militancy and what is positive in the affective refusal of Empire, such people have a corpse in their mouth. Carla Bergman and Nick Montgomery help us to remove that corpse so that we can sing new subversive songs, which is precisely what is needed more than ever."
- Stevphen Shukaitis, author of The Composition of Movements to Come

"Yes, yes, yes! This book is so timely! Absolutely what we need in these days of spreading gloom. A very well argued case for joyful militancy, and against the dead hand of puritanical revolution. Read it, live it!"
- John Holloway, author of Crack Capitalism

"This wonderful book, infused and informed by activist experience, emphasizes the importance of the full range of political affects. Anger and rage rightly, inevitably drive militants, the authors argue, but we must also discover joy and friendship in struggle, which are our highest rewards. The book provides not only an antidote for anyone who has suffered the pitfalls of political activism but also a guide to a fulfilling militant life."
- Michael Hardt, co-author of

carla joy bergman is an independent scholar, writer, podcaster, and mom. She has spent the past two decades working in her community to create collaborative multi-media platforms that range from print to films. carla loves to zoom in on the in-between happenings and issues and to bust binaries. She is the editor of Trust Kids: Stories on Youth Autonomy and Confronting Adult Supremacy, co-editor of Stay Solid: A Radical Handbook for Youth and co-founder of Grounded Futures, and is continuing to write on a variety of subjects. She lives in Vancouver, Canada.

Nick Montgomery is an organizer and writer currently at Queen's University.

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Joyful Militancy investigates how fear, self-righteousness, and moralism infiltrate and take root within liberation movements, what to do about them, and ultimately how tenderness and vulnerability can thrive alongside fierce militant commitment. Why do radical movements and spaces sometimes feel laden with fear, anxiety, suspicion, self-righteousness, and competition?

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In this series of essays Fred Moten and Stefano Harney draw on the theory and practice of the black radical tradition as it supports, inspires, and extends contemporary social and political thought...

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In this ambitious successor to The Great Derangement, acclaimed writer Amitav Ghosh finds the origins of our contemporary climate crisis in Western colonialism's violent exploitation of human life and the natural environment.

A powerful work of history, essay, testimony, and polemic, Amitav Ghosh's new book traces our contemporary planetary crisis back to the discovery of the New World and the sea route to the Indian Ocean. The Nutmeg's Curse argues that the dynamics of climate change today are rooted in a centuries-old geopolitical order constructed by Western colonialism. At the center of Ghosh's narrative is the now-ubiquitous spice nutmeg. The history of the nutmeg is one of conquest and exploitation-of both human life and the natural environment. In Ghosh's hands, the story of the nutmeg becomes a parable for our environmental crisis, revealing the ways human history has always been entangled with earthly materials such as spices, tea, sugarcane, opium, and fossil fuels. Our crisis, he shows, is ultimately the result of a mechanistic view of the earth, where nature exists only as a resource for humans to use for our own ends, rather than a force of its own, full of agency and meaning.

Writing against the backdrop of the global pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests, Ghosh frames these historical stories in a way that connects our shared colonial histories with the deep inequality we see around us today. By interweaving discussions on everything from the global history of the oil trade to the migrant crisis and the animist spirituality of Indigenous communities around the world, The Nutmeg's Curse offers a sharp critique of Western society and speaks to the profoundly remarkable ways in which human history is shaped by non-human forces.

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In this ambitious successor to The Great Derangement, acclaimed writer Amitav Ghosh finds the origins of our contemporary climate crisis in Western colonialism's violent exploitation of human life and the natural environment. A powerful work of history, essay, testimony, and polemic, Amitav Ghosh's new book traces our contemporary planetary crisis back to the discovery of the New World and the sea route to the Indian Ocean.

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"Intro" to the Queer Art of Failure

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Jack Halberstam's The Queer Art of Failure: Low Theory Examples 06/06/2018 Sura Tewolde Exigency redefine success to defeat the heteronormative and capitalistic notion -- reproduction and wealth Argument failure is better than success because failure leads to "unexpected

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"After reading Teaching to Transgress I am once again struck by bell hooks's never-ending, unquiet intellectual energy, an energy that makes her radical and loving." -- Paulo Freire

In Teaching to Transgress,bell hooks--writer, teacher, and insurgent black intellectual--writes about a new kind of education, education as the practice of freedom. Teaching students to "transgress" against racial, sexual, and class boundaries in order to achieve the gift of freedom is, for hooks, the teacher's most important goal.

bell hooks speaks to the heart of education today: how can we rethink teaching practices in the age of multiculturalism? What do we do about teachers who do not want to teach, and students who do not want to learn? How should we deal with racism and sexism in the classroom?

Full of passion and politics, Teaching to Transgress combines a practical knowledge of the classroom with a deeply felt connection to the world of emotions and feelings. This is the rare book about teachers and students that dares to raise questions about eros and rage, grief and reconciliation, and the future of teaching itself.

"To educate is the practice of freedom," writes bell hooks, "is a way of teaching anyone can learn." Teaching to Transgress is therecord of one gifted teacher's struggle to make classrooms work.

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Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

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"After reading Teaching to Transgress I am once again struck by bell hooks's never-ending, unquiet intellectual energy, an energy that makes her radical and loving." -- Paulo Freire In Teaching to Transgress,bell hooks--writer, teacher, and insurgent black intellectual--writes about a new kind of education, education as the practice of freedom.

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Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social

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Memorial for Dr. Maria C. Lugones

MALCS Journal
Wanda Alarcón and Cindy Cruz
University of Arizona

I want my communal self wide.

Maria Lugones

January 26, 1944 - July 14, 2020

It is a shock to accept that Maria Cristina Lugones is no longer with us. She is not in Binghamton, Nueva York, in her grand home with the stone fireplace, the long uphill road that leads to her front door. She is not on the other side of the telephone line. It is a shock because we spoke so recently with Maria. She said she was fine with sheltering in place and that when she goes out into the public she is covered from head to toe. "I look like a ninja," Maria told us and we all laughed at the image. She had every confidence that there would be time to talk together, with a slowly progressing cancer, that we would meet again in Valdez, New Mexico. Now that we are Tucsonianas, we were that much closer to Maria.

Nuestra reina filosofa feminista cachapera compañera tortillera del barrio y the
movement peregrina curdler "world"-traveller callejera theorist
translator tango-dancer calo poet improper linguist singer decolonial doodler popular educator theorist of US woman of color feminism scholar of resistance and radical friendship

This is how we remember you, Maria. You are many-worlded and we are privileged to travel to you and be with you in many of our worlds that still touch and cross.

Maria Cristina Lugones was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on January 26, 1944. She began her undergraduate studies at the University of Buenos Aires and transferred to UCLA where she majored in Philosophy and graduated in 1969. Beginning her graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, she received her PhD in Philosophy in 1978. She became faculty at Carleton College soon after and joined Binghamton University in 1993, where she created the important Center for Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture. Maria was also a popular educator and greatly inspired by the Highlander Folk School, she co-founded and sustained La Escuela Popular Norteña in Valdez, New Mexico.

With a long and illustrious career, the impact of Maria's groundbreaking thinking is felt in multiple fields beyond her training in philosophy. Her body of work is incredibly creative, radical, and distinguished by a poetic voice audible in her earliest writings, including the 1983 essay/dialogue with Elizabeth Spellman, "Have We Got A Theory for You!," and across all her writings. Maria's 2003 book, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions gathers some of her most important papers, including "Playfulness, "World"-Travelling and Loving Perception," among many others. Her work inspired a 2018 conference dedicated to her, Towards Decolonial Feminisms at Penn State University, the anthology Speaking Face to Face: The Visionary Philosophy of Maria Lugones, and three special issues in several journals- Hypatia, Critical Philosophy of Race, and Frontiers. Maria was awarded the 2020 Franz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association and the 2016 Distinguished Woman Philosopher Award from the Society for Women in Philosophy.

Her work on decoloniality has been translated into Spanish, notably the articles "Colonialidad y género" published in Tabula Rasa in 2008 and "Género y descolonialidad: Hacia un feminismo descolonial" in the 2014 Género y Descolonialidad. Francophone audiences can read "Playfulness" as "Attitude joueuse" in the 2011 issue of Les Cahiers du CEDREF titled "Théories féministes et queers décoloniales: Interventions Chicanas et Latinas états-uniennes" alongside and other classic U.S. women of color writings in translation. The essays "Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System" and "Toward a Decolonial Feminism" introduce her indispensable thesis on "the coloniality of gender" and offers a praxical response to undoing it. "If gender is our destiny," Maria would say, "then we are doomed."

Her lasting contributions to major conversations on gender, race, resistance, decolonial thought and decolonial feminism place her among the luminaries of feminist philosophy and woman of color theorizing. Her many students, collaborators, and lifelong friends honor her in their continued work in INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence and La Escuela Popular Norteña even as we mourn and feel her passing from this world deeply. Maria Lugones was a genius and a visionary teacher and compañera and we are honored to have known her and worked along side of her tremendous energy.

We met Maria Lugones at a birthday party in a snowstorm in upstate New York. She was intense and laughed out loud and was serious all at the same time. She had to leave the party early so that she could snowplow her long driveway. Yes, she owned her own snowplow for her house that was once a hunter's lodge. She cooked souffles, paellas, bundt cakes, bread and opened her home to us as we talked about growing up machonas and troublemakers. Her living room had a river stone fireplace and a well-loved piano where we imagined she played and sang tangos and milongas. We danced salsa and practiced our "decolonial turn" in the great room of her house with new friends at the summer institute party. When we heard Maria talk about La Escuela Popular Norteña and the coalitional work happening in Valdez, New Mexico, we are sure we fell in love with this woman, this fierce tortillera thinker who talked and walked her praxis in all the ways that we wanted to live our lives in the world. "Look at all these nice buildings, all this space. The university is just space," she told us. Maria believed in making a "university within a university," occupying space to do this important work of decolonial feminist practice.

We would like to think about Maria's notion of faithful witnessing, where we learn with others the difficult practice of recognizing resistance in the smallest of gestures and spaces. It is very hard work to reconsider, revise, and reconfigure experience, to move against the grain of power and refuse to act in loyalty with oppression. Faithful witnessing is Maria's calling for Chicanas and women of color to move away from a monosensical life, to find different ways of accessing meanings that can be constructed against the grain of oppression, to "world"-travel in ways that are not agonistic or hierarchical, racist or transphobic, to "sense resistance, to interpret behavior as resistant even when it is dangerous..." (p. 2 Pilgrimages).

Why faithful witnessing? Because now it is our turn to recognize Maria's everyday resisting, where in this capitalist, individualistic and very hierarchical place of the university, she created spaces for us to think and practice together outside of the surveillance of power. She is asking us to think communally, rigorously, and responsibly despite the indifference of the university of our presence. In her many worlds of sense-the activist worlds of INCITE and La Escuela, in the world of the Center for Philosophy, Interpretation and Culture, and in the many "worlds" of her activism and the research working groups she developed such as Decolonial Thinking, Decolonial Feminisms, and the Politics of U.S. Women of Color (among many others)-all spaces of resistance within universities and in community spaces that want change and nothing less than recognition of themselves as survival-rich and life-affirming communities.

In our faithful witnessing, we recognize the radicalness of Maria's persistence, her body always in pain. A young student told a story of her conversations with Maria, knowing she was in pain yet she always smiled to see her. The good conversations, the student believes, helped relieve a little of Maria's suffering. Her persistence saved her own life many times, from illness, violence, and imprisonment. In Maria's persistence over oppression, she yearned for the company of women and radical friendships.

I am incomplete and unreal without other women. I am profoundly dependent on others without having to be their subordinate, their slave, their servant.
(p. 8 "Playfulness")

We read the obituary in the Washington Post that mentions in passing that Maria was a lesbian. It is important to us that we know her as a tortillera, una cachapera y marimacha, a jota or dyke who insisted that male scholars take seriously the work of US feminists and queers of color. Maria took seriously the work of US woman of color thought, she drew life from their work and then extended it in her new theorizing of decolonial feminism. But in particular, Maria took seriously the work of Chicanas, especially Borderlands, where she found her thinking intertwined with Anzaldúa and in that space she discovered a "borderdwelling friendship."

I have seen Chicanas become Chicanas
-Maria Lugones

"Why do we love Maria Lugones so much? Because she loves Chicanas," our friend Marcelle Maese exclaimed. These are the outrageous things we can only say at MALCS that other mujeres would understand. In the first lines of " Borderlands/La Frontera: An Interpretive Essay" Maria writes that she felt from the first moment that she and Anzaldúa were "hermanas de pensamiento." Maria sustained a philosophical relationship with Anzaldúa's pensamiento for over twenty years. We like to think of this as not only an intellectual relationship but also as an act of radical friendship, what our friend Marcelle recognizes as "friendship as coalition but also as reading practice." Maria is one of Anzaldúa's most important interpreters. We know from Anzaldúa's good friend Randy Conner that she loved Maria's work too.

The essays "On Borderlands/La Frontera: An Interpretive Essay," "From Within Germinative Stasis: Creating Active Subjectivity, Resistant Agency," and "It's All About Having a History," offer deeply engaged, creative, and rigorous readings of her work and trace the shifts in Maria's thinking, the deepening of her insights on Anzaldúa's complex interlingual thought. Perhaps one of her most moving offerings in reading Borderlands is a way to sense the communal in what seems the solitary path of the shaman. In her recent lectures, Maria offers us a new reading of Borderlands as a cosmology. This idea was presented in the keynote talks "Mestizaje and the Communal" (The Feminist Architecture of Gloria Anzaldúa Conference at UCSC, 2015) and "My stories are acts encapsulated in time" (Gloria Anzaldúa: Translating B/borders Conference at the University of Paris, 2019). Maria does not let us forget Anzaldúa's queerness, integral to coalition, although "queer" is not the term she would use. To explain why she names what Anzaldúa created a Chicana cosmology, she offers these bold conclusions:

Thank you Maria for the way you have cared for and been in pensamiento with this cherished Chicana text. Together we learn to be better readers of Anzaldúan thinking.

Pachuca Caló at Binghamton

(Wanda's Reflection) Binghamton's Center for Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture (CPIC) was a radical space. I was a graduate student in English but I spent all my time amongst Maria's advanced doctoral students and the active decolonial thinking groups. A theoretically rich and generative space, CPIC was an immensely creative place to learn. Graduate school began before classes actually started when I attended the Decolonial Thinking Summer Institute. Later for my graduate language requirement, I took "Pachuco Caló" with Maria. I had not read most of Maria's works, she was still writing "Toward a Decolonial Feminism," yet I learned what I consider core ideas and practices of decolonial feminism in this class. We read the caló poetry of Chicano poets like José Montoya and we read the interlingual literary theory of Chicano poetics by Alfred Arteaga. Without sanitizing the poetry, Maria asked how we could think of the language in ways that did not immediately tie it to criminality or marginality. For instance, the word "mujerona" could have several meanings and not all needed to be oppressive or dehumanizing. Our thinking was informed by postcolonial translation theories but the way she approached the class was very much in a decolonial mode. We looked up words and re-read and re-listened to them. One week we would identify all of the words for gender, another all of the words for flora and fauna, these tasks shared and divided among us. We worked in the library and collected all of the dictionaries on Chicano language we could find and we began the work of delinking caló from logics of marginality and the categorizing projects of dictionaries. We examined this living, resistant, unassimilable language in a decolonial mode. We even made our own caló lexicon.

I've been thinking about what this experience means. As a first generation Chicana from East Los Angeles, it's beyond serendipitous to me that I had to travel all the way to New York and meet Maria to learn caló. This class only really matters to other Chicanxs. It matters because she took our work seriously. Maria took this poetry and theory created by marginalized people in this country, further marginalized in the university, and she placed it at the center of our thinking and learning. This is one of the ways she showed us that the theories of people of color are whole knowledges that did not require comparison to hegemonic worldviews or officially recognized canons or philosophies. I learned this through Maria's radical pedagogy in that class, in her generous mentorship toward me, and in her sustained work with other Chicanas, in particular, Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera.

Finishing the class, I remember all of her students said, "Now you can teach it, you teach the decolonial." That's how I think of her, a consummate teacher. Maria's teaching lives in her wonderful graduate students that we met in Binghamton, many of whom are professors now, colleagues and friends. The stellar roster includes: Manuel Chavez, Josh Franco, Nikolay Karkov, Jen-Feng Kuo, Hilary Malatino, Xhercis Mendez, Pedro diPietro, Shireen Roshanravan, Gabriel Soldatenko, and Gabriella Veronelli among many others. At CPIC I never felt the tension of competition or individuality or conformity I would come to experience in other academic spaces. I learned to work alongside others in a capacious way, all of us gathered in this decolonial work together yet always plural with room for all who came as we were.

Maria was my teacher, a most cherished and respected mentor, though it hurt her feelings to be thought of as someone apart from the group. I will always learn from her.

I Am Playful With You In This World

( Cindy's Reflection) It is true that I met Maria in a snowstorm. I had moved to upstate New York for a postdoc at Cornell and was invited to the 2007 Decolonial Thinking Summer Institute at Binghamton University. It was there I was introduced to Maria's work and wonderful students, where a theory of race and gender and the story of the rise of modernity/coloniality was put together on such a scale that I felt like tossing my previous training as a critical pedagogist out the window. Beginning with the work of US feminists of color, Maria and Catherine Walsh discussed how race and gender and the New World collided, speaking truth to power. I saw the histories of my family as part of this new thinking, my own commitment to woman of color theory and listening to this new work, I experienced the same feeling I had when as an undergraduate a professor broke it down about race and class in the US and I was shaking for days. It was that intense and I wanted more.

Maria's "Playfulness" article is a primer to understand and create relationships that are not based in domination. I think it is rare to experience a relationship in schools that is not of a conquistador/"world"-destroyer, gatekeeper or voyeur. I work with new teachers. It makes sense that we read "Playfulness" first in my education classrooms, where it is mostly white middle class teachers who will be working in schools with mostly brown and black students and their families. It is important that new teachers take the time to think about coalitional relations and meditate on Maria's words:

The reason why I think that travelling to someone's "world" is a way of identifying with them is because by travelling to their "world" we can understand what it is to be them and what it is to be ourselves in their eyes.
(p. 17 of "Playfulness")

I have a personal example of coalitional relations. All through my undergraduate and graduate school years, I played rugby. I have played many sports, but I have never found anything as close to the camaraderie of the rugby team I played with for over 10 years. I'm sure what made it even more enjoyable was that we won often and we were arguably all friends, at least on the pitch. But what I have realized after all those years of being "retired" from rugby (we old girls don't quit the sport-we retire) was that it was one of the few places were I have practiced something like coalition.

In rugby, you can only pass the ball horizontally, never forward. Unlike the specialized positions in football, rugby is a game where every player is valuable no matter your position, and if you want the ball you support the ball carrier, because eventually the ball carrier will need to pass the ball to a teammate in order to continue the play and move the ball downfield for a try. When you want the ball or when you know that your teammate carrying the ball forward is going to get tackled, you call out "with you," as in "I am with you for a pass on the right side or I am with you for a pass on your left." I knew my teammate Sue was always going to be supporting me on my left. She would say "with you" and I would pass the ball laterally and now I became her support. The relation is horizontal when you pass the ball at a full run to your teammate and then it's your responsibility to support the ball carrier. When the pass is done right, it is beautiful.

I am sharing this example of rugby passing because it's one place where I have been able to practice and experience non-hierarchical, horizontal relations with others. There is a pedagogy to rugby passing and I know I learned to be "with you" through the many afternoons of practicing this relation until my teammates and I could do it even as we were getting tackled. Now as a scholar of pedagogy, I am trying to figure out ways of helping new teachers in Arizona public schools develop skills of coalitional relations for their own work in and outside of the classroom. I often imagine what this relation of being "with you" might look like for teachers. If being "with you" is the relation necessary to build coalition or simply to build relationships with your students and their families that are not based on dominating or assimilating them, then how can I move this idea forward with my new teachers?

It is Maria's work that helps me think about the practices of decolonial feminism, where I feel free to use rugby passing as an example of coalition. I was honored that Maria came to see our panel at the Penn State conference dedicated to her work. As part of the roundtable activity, we asked people to draw their impressions of our presentations, to "doodle decolonially." Here is Maria's playful doodle of our panel:

I am forever grateful for meeting Maria, her friendship and hospitality and generosity in her invitation to participate in her research working groups and to be a part of creating a popular education project with youth in Valdez. I am and will always be with you, Maria.

Vuela, vuela palomita...

The last time we spoke with Maria we talked about reuniting in New Mexico once we got out of this pandemic. We looked forward to participating the work of La Escuela and mostly catching up with Maria. We had so many things to talk about and we were sure there would be time.

Maria Lugones, Presente!
Maria Lugones, Presente!
Maria Lugones, Presente!
Maria Lugones, Presente!

Acknowledgements

We wrote this memorial with the company of many friends who loved Maria. We thank them for their contributions of time, art, images, memories, and stories and hope that they see and hear themselves reflected here in this remembrance. We especially thank Alma Lopez Gaspar de Alba for the beautiful and playful digital portrait "Our Philosopher Queen" and to Pedro diPietro for permission to use personal photographs. It was Angie Chabram and Maria Soldatenko who first called Maria "our philosopher queen." The more we speak about Maria the more stories we hear, even through our broken corazones. Mil gracias to Joshua Price and Rick Santos for sharing some of Maria's favorite tangos in "Lugo's Tango Mixtape." And finally, a big thank you to MALCS Chair Yvette Saavedra for the invitation to write this for Maria. It has been a labor of love.

Lugones Citations & Websites of Interest
Playlist
Lugo's Tango Mixtape
Anthologies and Special Issues
Hypatia Special Issue 35.3, Summer 2020: Tracing the Lineages of Decolonial Thinking Through Latinx Feminist Philosophy
https://www-cambridge-org.oca.ucsc.edu/core/journals/hypatia/firstview

Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies Special Issue 41.1, May, 2020: "World"-Making and "World"-Travelling with Decolonial Feminisms and Women of Color.
https://muse-jhu-edu.oca.ucsc.edu/issue/42309
Conferences and Keynotes
Toward Decolonial Feminisms: A Conference Inspired by the Work of María Lugones. Nittany Lion Inn, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, USA. May 11-13, 2018.

The Feminist Architecture of Gloria Anzaldua Conference at University of California, Santa Cruz. Date. May 2015. Keynote Talk: "Mestizaje and the Communal"

Video Link: https://thi.ucsc.edu/event/anzaldua-2/
Work In Translation, Honors, and Other References
Les Cahiers du CEDREF: Centre d'Enseignement, de Documentation, et de Recherches pour les Etudes Feministes.
https://journals.openedition.org/cedref/667

Chicana and U.S. Latina feminist, queer, and decolonial theories translations into French. A project directed by Paola Bacchetta, Julie Falquet, and Norma Alarcon. https://journals.openedition.org/cedref/667

Global Social Theory

The Franz Fanon Prize, 2020, Carribean Philosophical Association http://www.caribbeanphilosophicalassociation.org/the-frantz-fanon-award.html
Select Publications
Milongueando macha homoerotics: Dancing the tango, torta style (a performative testimonial). Performing the US Latina and Latino Borderlands (2012): 51-57. https://iupress.org/9780253005748/performing-the-us-latina-and-latino-borderlands/

Heterosexualism in the Colonial/Modern Gender System - Hypatia vol 22 no 1 (Winter 2007). https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2007.tb01156.x?casa_token=0QQJryyyQrgAAAAA:uRr3oQ0rbxZm3vdg9snYNzWXyQ1U002NQWbvwvHZEEaZByNcAdP7JoAcvYSza146hBNwyhQm7DMUc5c

Wicked Caló: A Matter of the Authority of Improper Words - In Feminist Interpretations of Mary Daly. Edited by Marilyn Frye and Sarah Lucia Hoagland. Penn State University Press, 2000. http://www.psupress.org/books/titles/0-271-02018-0.html

Motion, Stasis, and Resistance to Interlocked Oppressions - In Making Worlds: Gender, Metaphor, Materiality. Edited by Susan Hardy Aiken, et al. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1998. https://uapress.arizona.edu/book/making-worlds

Enticements and Dangers of Community for a Radical Politics - In Blackwell Companion to Feminist Philosophy. Edited by Iris Young and Alison Jaggar. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998. https://philpapers.org/rec/JAGACT

Playfulness,"world"‐travelling, and loving perception. Hypatia 2, no. 2 (1987): 3-19. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.1987.tb01062.x

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Maria Lugones - Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social

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Memorial for Dr. Maria C. Lugones MALCS JournalWanda Alarcón and Cindy CruzUniversity of Arizona I want my communal self wide. Maria Lugones January 26, 1944 - July 14, 2020 It is a shock to accept that Maria Cristina Lugones is ... Read More

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A New York Times Bestseller
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Updated with a new introduction from Robin Wall Kimmerer, the hardcover special edition of Braiding Sweetgrass, reissued in honor of the fortieth anniversary of Milkweed Editions, celebrates the book as an object of meaning that will last the ages. Beautifully bound with a new cover featuring an engraving by Tony Drehfal, this edition includes a bookmark ribbon, and five brilliantly colored illustrations by artist Nate Christopherson. In increasingly dark times, we honor the experience that more than 350,000 readers in North America have cherished about the book-gentle, simple, tactile, beautiful, even sacred-and offer an edition that will inspire readers to gift it again and again, spreading the word about scientific knowledge, indigenous wisdom, and the teachings of plants.

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Indigenous, Nature, science, Native American, traditional ecological knowledge, Natural history, Ecology, botany, plants, essays, environment, spirituality, nonfiction, life sciences, spiritual, teaching, wisdom

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Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is the author of the New York Times bestselling collection of essays Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants.

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From intimate relationships to global politics, Sarah Schulman observes a continuum: that inflated accusations of harm are used to avoid accountability. Illuminating the difference between Conflict and Abuse, Schulman directly addresses our contemporary culture of scapegoating. This deep, brave, and bold work reveals how punishment replaces personal and collective self-criticism, and shows why difference is so often used to justify cruelty and shunning. Rooting the problem of escalation in negative group relationships, Schulman illuminates the ways in which cliques, communities, families, and religious, racial, and national groups bond through the refusal to change their self-concept. She illustrates how Supremacy behaviour and Traumatized behaviour resemble each other, through a shared inability to tolerate difference.

This important and sure to be controversial book brings insight into contemporary and historical issues of personal, racial and geo-political difference, as tools of escalation towards injustice, exclusion and punishment, whether the objects of dehumanization are other individuals in our families or communities, African Americans at the hands of police, people with HIV, and Palestinians. Conflict Is Not Abuse is a searing rejection of the cultural phenomenon of blame, cruelty, and scapegoating, revealing how those in positions of power exacerbate and manipulate fear of the "other" to avoid facing themselves.

Short-listed, Lambda Literary Award 2017

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With awesome brilliance and insight, Sarah Schulman offers readers new strategies to intervene on all relations of domination both personal and political. The core of this book provides ways to think and move beyond blaming and/or assuming victimhood -- so that each of us may come to understand the role we assume in creating and sustaining conflicts in all our relations. Sharing myriad ways, critical vigilance can help us all understand that conflict need not be viewed as abuse, that essential distinctions may be made between the hurt we experience in conflict and the violence of abuse, Schulman offers a vision of mutual recognition and accountability that liberates. -bell hooks

It's impossible to be invested in the world and not be invested in this groundbreaking and challenging book. From a position of artist and social critic, Sarah Schulman gives us a detailed and considered reading of some of our most overly determined and venomous conflicts. Conflict Is Not Abuse is a book to interrogate, ponder, and discuss. -Claudia Rankine

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Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Non-Fiction winner From intimate relationships to global politics, Sarah Schulman observes a continuum: that inflated accusations of harm are used to avoid accountability. Illuminating the difference between Conflict and Abuse, Schulman directly addresses our contemporary culture of scapegoating.

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Table of Contents

PART ONE: Introduction -- Chapter 1: Moral Boundaries and Political Change -- The Power of Context and the Context of Power, Three Moral Boundaries, Women's Morality As a Strategic Predicament, Argument of This Book -- PART Two: Against "Women's Morality" -- Chapter 2: Universalistic Morality and Moral Sentiments -- Morality and Forms of Life, Universalistic Morality and Eighteenth Century Life, Social Distance and the Demise of Moral Sentiments, The Containment of Women and the Engendering of Moral Sentiment, Lessons for an Ethic of Care -- Chapter 3: Is Morality Gendered? -- Lawrence Koh /berg: The Virtuous Elite, Carol Gilligan's Different Voice and its Limits, Gender Ideology and Forms of Privilege At Work -- PART THREE: For An Ethic of Care -- Chapter 4: Care IOI -- Defining Care, Marginalizing Care, The Promise of Care: Care's Power -- Chapter 5: An Ethic of Care -- The Practice of An Ethic of Care, Moral Dilemmas in the Practice of Care, Expanding Our Moral Terrain, Ethics and Politics -- Chapter 6: Care and Political Theory -- Against a "Morality First" Strategy, Care As a Political Ideal o Care And Political Strategy, Moral Boundaries and a Political Concept of Care -- NOTES -- INDEX.

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Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care

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PART ONE: Introduction -- Chapter 1: Moral Boundaries and Political Change -- The Power of Context and the Context of Power, Three Moral Boundaries, Women's Morality As a Strategic Predicament, Argument of This Book -- PART Two: Against "Women's Morality" -- Chapter 2: Universalistic Morality and Moral Sentiments -- Morality and Forms of Life, Universalistic Morality and Eighteenth Century Life, Social Distance and the Demise of Moral Sentiments, The Containment of Women and the Engendering of Moral Sentiment, Lessons for an Ethic of Care -- Chapter 3: Is Morality Gendered?

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Teaching Resistance is a collection of the voices of activist educators from around the world who engage inside and outside the classroom from pre-kindergarten to university and emphasize teaching radical practice from the field. Written in accessible language, this book is for anyone who wants to explore new ways to subvert educational systems and institutions, collectively transform educational spaces, and empower students and other teachers to fight for genuine change. Topics include community self-defense, Black Lives Matter and critical race theory, intersections between punk/DIY subculture and teaching, ESL, anarchist education, Palestinian resistance, trauma, working-class education, prison teaching, the resurgence of (and resistance to) the Far Right, special education, antifascist pedagogies, and more.

Edited by social studies teacher, author, and punk musician John Mink, the book features expanded entries from the monthly column in the politically insurgent punk magazine Maximum Rocknroll, plus new works and extensive interviews with subversive educators. Contributing teachers include Michelle Cruz Gonzales, Dwayne Dixon, Martín Sorrondeguy, Alice Bag, Miriam Klein Stahl, Ron Scapp, Kadijah Means, Mimi Nguyen, Murad Tamini, Yvette Felarca, Jessica Mills, and others, all of whom are unified against oppression and readily use their classrooms to fight for human liberation, social justice, systemic change, and true equality.

Royalties will be donated to Teachers 4 Social Justice: t4sj.org
Praise:
" Teaching Resistance brings us the voices of activist educators who are fighting back inside and outside of the classroom. The punk rock spirit of this collection of concise, hard-hitting essays is bound to stir up trouble."
-Mark Bray, historian, author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook and coeditor of Anarchist Education and the Modern School: A Francisco Ferrer Reader

"Where was Teaching Resistance when I was in school? This essay collection both makes a compelling case for why radical classrooms are necessary and lays out how they can be put into practice. A perfect guide for educators and anyone working with young people, this book vitally also speaks to the student's experience. Even for the kid-adverse activists among us, Teaching Resistance reminds us that kids can be our comrades if we meet them halfway. The younger generations deserve more from us-this is the primer for how to start providing it."
-Shawna Potter, singer for War on Women, author of Making Spaces Safer

"Schools are implicated in the reproduction of inequality in society, but they don't have to be. When educators are intentional about their desire to challenge inequality, when they are unafraid of disrupting the status quo and challenging hierarchies, and when they actively seek to empower their students, schools can be-come a force for equity and justice. Teaching Resistance is written by educators who are currently doing this kind of work and it will serve as a source of inspiration to others. Teachers who are willing to use their power in the classroom to encourage critical thinking and creativity can become genuine allies of their students and the communities they serve, and they can indeed make a difference."
-Pedro A. Noguera, author of City Schools and the American Dream and The Trouble with Black Boys: . . . and Other Reflections on Race, Equity, and the Future of Public Education

"In Teaching Resistance an extraordinary collective of educators combines a sophisticated analysis with philosophical nuance and original theorization of radical educational practices. This is a great collection and one that we need to understand radical education at the ground level-and to do so for a wide range of purposes."
-Andrej Grubačić, coauthor of Wobblies and Zapatistas and Living at the Edges of Capitalism: Adventures in Exile and Mutual Aid

"At a time when white supremacist fascism has (re)asserted its ascendancy in the U.S., the putrid effluent perpetually oozing from its gangrenous societal tissues having become a torrent threatening to drown us all, resistance of the most concrete and effective sorts is imperative. In this respect, a book like Teaching Resistance couldn't be more urgently needed."
-Ward Churchill, author of Wielding Words like Weapons: Selected Essays in Indigenism, 1995-2005

"This is an inspiring collection of reflections and stories from teachers working on the front-line in a range of both formal and informal educational spaces. Ever conscious of the harsh political and social realities facing teachers and pupils, the authors combine an activist stance with a wealth of pedagogical experience and a commitment to the emancipatory potential of educational encounters, without ever sinking into a romantic optimism or a politics of despair. Including discussions of racism, special education, early years education, prisons, art education and anarchist pedagogy, and ranging across diverse international contexts, the contributors offer an admirable combination of rigorous theoretical analysis and first-person accounts of practice. This collection is a powerful reminder that the radical voices of 'outsiders' and the marginal are crucial in addressing the pressing political issues of our time, and that it is within our educational spaces that these voices must and can be heard and creatively engaged with."
-Judith Suissa, author of Anarchism and Education
About the Editor:
John Mink is a social studies teacher who has worked at the high school and adult school levels, and who refuses to hide his political radicalism from his students. He has been a contributing writer and editor for underground publications and zines including Slingshot, Absolutely Zippo: A Fanzine's Anthology, and Collapse Board. Editor of the Maximum Rocknroll monthly column "Teaching Resistance" and a vocalist/bassist for several internationally recognized punk bands, John lives in Berkeley, California, with his partner Megan March, who is also his bandmate in the truewave/punk group Street Eaters.

See and hear editor interviews, book reviews, and other news on John Mink' s page HERE
Click here for one-page information sheet on this product

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Teaching Resistance: Radicals, Revolutionaries, and Cultural Subversives in the Classroom

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Teaching Resistance is a collection of the voices of activist educators from around the world who engage inside and outside the classroom from pre-kindergarten to university and emphasize teaching radical practice from the field.

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"We are withdrawing from networks of reciprocity that once constituted our communities" argued sociologist Robert Putnam in "Social trust has deteriorated further over the past twenty years as well" reports Putnam in 2020, revisiting the analysis 20 years after Bowling Alone, his groundbreaking analysis of American social organizations during the second half of the 20th century. 1. Bowling Alone was originally published. ¹

The touchstone of social capital is the principle of generalized reciprocity - I'll do this for you now, without expecting anything immediately in return or perhaps without even knowing you, confident that down the road you or someone else will return the favor.From Robert Putnam's
Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community

This erosion of social trust and reciprocity can lead to what Pema Chödrön called the worst of humanity, when "people become poisoned by self-doubt; what Toni Morrison called the "othering" of society.

Rebecca Solnit (born 1961), a writer of sharp self-consciousness and precious world-awareness diagrams similar dissolution of society in A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster.

Solnit explains the forces that compound social selfishness:

Most traditional societies have deeply entrenched commitments and connections between individuals, families, and groups. The very concept of society rests on the idea of networks of affinity and affection, and the freestanding individual exists largely as an outcast or exile. Mobile and individualistic modern societies shed some of these old ties and vacillate about taking on others, especially those expressed through economic arrangements-including provisions for the aged and vulnerable, the mitigation of poverty and desperation-the keeping of one's brothers and sisters. The argument against such keeping is often framed as an argument about human nature: we are essentially selfish, and because you will not care for me, I cannot care for you. I will not feed you because I must hoard against starvation, since I too cannot count on others. Better yet, I will take your wealth and add it to mine-if I believe that my well-being is independent of yours or pitted against yours-and justify my conduct as natural law. If I am not my brother's keeper, then we have been expelled from paradise, a paradise of unbroken solidarities.

The book narrates five astoundingly destructive disasters, including the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and yet Solnit details that a society can be reawakened to its most compassionate self, to an inexpressible brotherly love.

In brotherly love there is the experience of union with all men, of human solidarity, of human at-onement. Brotherly love is based on the experience that we all are one. The differences in talents, intelligence, knowledge are negligible in comparison with the identity of the human core common to all men. In order to experience this identity it is necessary to penetrate from the periphery to the core.From Erich Fromm's
The Art of Loving

The consequence of these massive events, argues Solnit, is the proliferation of such love:

The image of the selfish, panicky, or regressively savage human being in times of disaster has little truth to it. In the wake of an earthquake, a bombing, or a major storm, most people are altruistic, urgently engaged in caring for themselves and those around them, strangers and neighbors as well as friends and loved ones.
[...]
But belief lags behind, and often the worst behavior in the wake of a calamity is on the part of those who believe that others will behave savagely and that they themselves are taking defensive measures against barbarism.

Solnit finds disruptions to society's physical structures is mirrored in disruptions of its social stratifications, which creates an indelible equality: "Nearly all shared an uncertain future - though because they were all in it together."

Solnit concludes the feeling of "we are all in it together" is something unique, wholly powerful, energizing and most surprisingly, likely to cultivate positive actions.

We don't even have a language for this emotion, in which the wonderful comes wrapped in the terrible, joy in sorrow, courage in fear.In her 2. memoirs working as a nurse in an emergency unit, Christie Watson recalls watching nurses care endlessly for the sick and injured. "I had no language for what they were doing, or for their job." The human capacity for love is truly beyond words. ² We cannot welcome disaster, but we can value the responses, both practical and psychological.

Given it is the 20th anniversary of 9/11 and how grieved many of us continue to feel towards that event, I pulled out some of the most precious, personal examples of post-disaster altruism that Solnit found during that particular event.

Zaheer Jaffery, a polio survivor from Pakistan, worked on the sixty-fifth floor of one of the towers and remembers the long journey down the stairs: "We had to stop several times during our descent because of injured people being brought down. For example, you would hear 'Move to the right, move to the right' and everybody would move to the right, so that the injured could be taken down. And this happened, three, four times. People in a groove and then they had to reposition themselves. And people would actually: 'No, no, you first.' I couldn't believe it, that at this point people would actually say, 'No, no, please take my place. It was uncanny." Eventually he got to the bottom of the stairs. "I was walking, very, very slow by now because I could barely walk. In the concourse level I was going so slow that two or three times people offered to carry me and I said, "No, no, maybe someone else needs help."

And the blood donations continued anyway-half a million donors, by one count, 125,000 gallons of donated blood, though far more people volunteered than donated. The Red Cross urged the White House's inhabitants to donate, and so they did, and so did many U.S. politicians, and even Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat, in a symbolically compelling and utter useless gesture. (Blood is carefully screened, the United States has strict criteria than many nations, and donations from abroad did not meet the standards.) People offered this stuff from their own bodies as though such a deep gift of life could somehow mitigate all that death. At St. Vincent's Hospital in the West Village, the lines of would-be donors wound around the block and eventually crowded the surrounding streets, becoming yet another way people passed the first hours and days out in public.

People helped however they could, the landslide of giving, kindness and caring matched the ruinous tumble of steel, concrete and earth.

Joe Blozis, an investigator for the police department, recalls, "Something else that I won't forget is that the civilians, the pedestrians on the streets and sidewalks, were actually directing traffic to help us get through. Not only us, but all emergency vehicles. Streams of people, lines of people, were stopping other pedestrians and clearing traffic ways to get the emergency vehicles in. If it weren't for the pedestrians doing this, it would have been a nightmare getting emergency vehicles down to that site.

In the breakdown of traditional systems, new grassroots groups began to form in locales close to but not immediately next to Ground Zero.

Solnit writes:

Temma Kaplan, a historian at Rutgers University who had participated in the civil rights movement's 1964 Freedom Summer, recalls, "Everybody wanted to respond. I went back to my block and some of my neighbors were on a street corner raising money; we didn't know what [for) but they thought that people would need things, and so they started raising money." They raised about sixteen thousand dollars from passersby in a few hours. She stayed out-of-doors, among the people who were almost all outside together. "By afternoon, Amsterdam Avenue had become like a river. People covered in dust were walking up the avenue-up Broadway, Amsterdam and Columbus avenues. It was as if they were getting as far away from the World Trade Center as possible and just walking north. It was a very warm day, like a summer day, but everybody was mourning, and people were in shock. The afternoon went on and on like a series of sequences of people trying alternately to comfort each other and get information about where people were and what we could do. Word would go out: rescue workers needed boots and they needed masks. Signs went up listing things workers needed and where, at what church, you could drop them off. Then a sign went up about cough drops. The rescue workers were choking on the smoke. Everybody cleaned out all of the drug store. People set out as if on a treasure hunt to find things."
She concluded, "On 9/11 I just needed to reaffirm that there was left a community, that people believed in things that were good, that we could go on and that there would be a going on. I felt that everybody was holding on to each other in order to try to brace and embrace each other, and it was both a horrible and wonderful experience at the same time."

The complexity and duality of emotions and the pure power that comes from human fear/joy is the heart of this book. Solnit captures the nuances - and beauty - of life, society and the human soul quite beautifully, as she always does.

Many fear that in disaster we become something other than we normally are - helpless or bestial and savage in the most common myths - or that is who we really are when the superstructure of society crumbles. We remain ourselves for the most part, but freed to act on, most often, not the worst but the best within. The ruts and routines of ordinary life hide more beauty than brutality.

Read more on human unity and disunity in Toni Morrison's The Origin of Others, James Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son, Simone Weil's The Need for Roots and building society reciprocity in Amanda Palmer's The Art of Asking and Hands Outstretched and Met.

Or treat yourself to Solnit's other work that enlightens our most shadowed, beautiful bits The Faraway Nearby and A Field Guide to Getting Lost.

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Rebecca Solnit- A Paradise Built in Hell

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"We are withdrawing from networks of reciprocity that once constituted our communities" argued sociologist Robert Putnam in "Social trust has deteriorated further over the past twenty years as well" reports Putnam in 2020, revisiting the analysis 20 years after Bowling Alone, his groundbreaking analysis of American social organizations during the second half of the 20th century.

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Realizing we are ALL 🤬 up and that we have become 🤬 may be one (or the only) way to break this spell of modernity/coloniality, to seek re-habilitation and to do the painful decluttering and composting work that is needed to get ourselves out of the mess we have created...

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Modernity/coloniality, especially in its contemporary configuration, casts a powerful spell of hyper-individualism, hyper-consumerism and (self)destructive narcissism. Through formal education, social media and job incentive packages, both mainstream and counter- cultures encourage and reward toxic behaviors. This includes seeing ourselves as separate from each other and from "nature", and as "exceptional" in order to justify merit and moral authority so that we can expand our entitlements and autonomy without responsibility.

We are unconsciously wired to reproduce behaviors that support the destruction of the web of relationships we are embedded in, including the planet that we are part of and depend upon. If our contemporary cultures cannot provide a pathway for collective sobriety and maturity or a compass for repairing damage and for building relationships based on respect, reciprocity, consent, trust and accountability, human extinction is indeed around the corner.

Realizing we are ALL fucked up and that we have become assholes may be one (or the only) way to break this spell of modernity/coloniality, to seek re-habilitation and to do the painful decluttering and composting work that is needed to get ourselves out of the mess we have created.

In our collective inquiry about assholism, we are exploring both the symptoms and potential roots of the problem. These are some of the questions we have asked:

1. What socially sanctioned conscious and unconscious compulsions could be preventing us from building relationships based on trust, reciprocity, consent, accountability and respect?

2. How do we benefit personally from these compulsions? How are we socially rewarded when we reproduce these behaviours?

We are also trying different tentative experiments to interrupt unconscious patterns of behavior that can limit our capacity to build generative relationships. One of the experiments that emerged from this inquiry was a list of anti-assholism reminders that could serve as a compass for what: a)we should never do; b)we should try to do less and less of; c)we should do only when we can do it genuinely; d) we should do regardless of whether it is genuine or not (e.g. be kind).

We are now testing it to see if, through practice and repetition, the list can help us rewire unconscious harmful patterns of behavior. You are invited to take part in this experiment too.

The first invitation is for you to read the list and to observe how you respond to the suggestions and reminders in it. What do these immediate responses say about where you are at? Pay particular attention to your positive (or negative) self-regard and how it could be in itself an important sign of delusion (of thinking you are further ahead or elsewhere in the process than you actually are).

It may be helpful to remember that, if you were indeed already doing the generative things, you would be hyper-self-reflexive (and aware of the relapses and difficulties of doing this work), which means that you would never be sure or certain that you will respond in generative ways when crises or conflicts arise. Like a recovering alcoholic, you would never take for granted that you are out of the woods. Similar to other addictions, our modern/colonial assholism may be a treatable disease, but it is prudent to assume that it is not curable.
As you read this list of suggestions/reminders, try to think about the rationale for each item in the context of building relations rooted in trust, respect, reciprocity, consent, accountability...
What you should never do

What you should do less and less and then not at all (if ever possible)

What you should try to do more of genuinely, and more genuinely (not as a sacrifice)

What you should try to do more and more (fake it until you make it)
Remember: We tend to judge others by their actions and ourselves by our intentions. Be compassionate towards others and hyper-alert to your indulgences.
Exercise for friends/relatives or partners:

1. Make a list of what would cause you to feel closer to [insert name of significant other human or non-human]?

2. Make a list of what would cause [significant other] to feel genuinely closer to you?

3. Make a list of what is difficult that you would need to do to move things in more generative directions in this relationship?

4. Make a list of things that prevent you from doing that.

5. Make a list of potential future implications and costs (for yourself and others) of you failing to move things differently?

6. Where is your motivation grounded? Is it sustainable? Do you have enough sense of urgency and importance in relation to this issue to do the challenging and painful work of dis-investing in harmful behavior and the risky, difficult and uncertain work of getting rewired into building more generative relationships? Make a list of three things you need to remember when you become frustrated, exhausted and unmotivated with the challenges of this work.

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Modernity/coloniality, especially in its contemporary configuration, casts a powerful spell of hyper-individualism, hyper-consumerism and (self)destructive narcissism. Through formal education, social media and job incentive packages, both mainstream and counter- cultures encourage and reward toxic behaviors. This includes seeing ourselves as separate from each other and from "nature", and as "exceptional" in order to justify merit...

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What a rare mushroom can teach us about sustaining life on a fragile planet

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The Art Of Fermentation : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

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Fermentation as Metaphor book. Read 13 reviews from the world's largest community for readers.