m of care – jan 6
david graeber and david wengrow‘s dawn of everything (book) ch 8
notes/quotes from gathering:
steve: setting out to debunk that as pop increases so does hierarchy.. give alt ie’s
steve: misguided by my own thinking of what a social revolution looks like.. ie: mexican, chinese, et al.. then saw.. this could have lasted 300 yrs.. so turned to david’s reminder that we wake up and make c anew each day.. so the temporal scale there is hour by hour..and that’s how i approach this sense of social revolution.. hour by hour.. and we can stop c at any minute.. so.. how do we recognize time scale.. reminder of how creative refusal can be practiced in a daily way.. but can also be connected to longer term projects
i think creative refusal is sucking our energies.. and what we need is more revolution – instigating utopia everyday – michael hardt
nika: what do you think of tech.. they didn’t have it.. but huge advance and people living well..
michael: i find the issue of scale was corrective to me.. scale becomes diff.. but not so..
ah.. so maybe tech as it could be is more about everyone in sync law
ah.. good point.. so perhaps tech more for getting us in sync (ultimate scale – ie: thinking has to be all of us) than scale we’ve been thinking about when we say scale.. large but not everyone
michael: what happens when scale changes rapidly
simona: on self org being less efficient.. and on neighborhood org.. reminds me of spinoza.. next week reading group (Political tratise chapters 1-5).. he makes a physics of power.. individuals can’t cope w complexity.. always oligarchy that controls city/state.. ch is very important.. main objection to self govern is of scale and complexity.. if global society can’t be org’d by centralization/order.. then no point in freedom.. in self org.. if people able to self org at bottom level and connect problem of scale is overcome.. this is crucial from my pov..
nika: talk more of spinoza and the physics of power.. like i’m living now among architects.. and i see how the space design affects us.. so what is physics of power
simona: spinoza is not the most important one.. actually this issue concerns collective intell and role of individuals in face of collective intell.. when david spoke about marxists and architects.. it was the issue of imagination.. same .. imo there is a binary relationship.. architect who designed your houses.. when such environs were a goal for architects.. i remember (?).. i was in uni campus.. it was designed to have people connect and live together while having their spaces.. t
oikos (the economy our souls crave).. ‘i should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.’ – gaston bachelard, the poetics of space
iwan baan ness and rp ness.. et al..
simona: one of spinoza’s questions was how can a multitude unite.. as if guided by only one mind.. he says.. not by a legislator/king.. unity is a process.. not something you or architect creates at beginning.. ‘it’s about constantly negotiating orders of the city’ – dg.. to spinoza.. it is the multitude that orgs itself.. problem spinoza didn’t solve.. how can a huge group coord and act together w/o a legislator.. t
imagine if we just focused on listening to the itch-in-8b-souls.. first thing.. everyday.. and used that data to augment our interconnectedness.. no matter how many people
again.. to what tech can now do.. help to undo our hierarchical listening (to me that’s how a huge group – aka: all of us.. can act together w/o any form of people telling other people what to do
dennis: on how these cities fed themselves.. that seems to be where hierarchies arise
from murray bookchin‘s ecology of freedom – the loss of this independence included the loss of the worker’s contact w food cultivation..
nika: on 70% of cities food were coming from land/gardens.. in these ch talking about larger.. like 200 000 people creating their own.. so it’s all possible..
dennis: i see 200 000 as hard to do.. there needs to be some structure of how that’s org’d..
kenneth: simona’s question.. how do we org communities/cities w/o legislature.. if everyone is an architect and everyone a legislature.. one thing from ursula le guin and hand/mind imagination.. might be easier if we let our hands imagine as well.. ie: now in toronto.. no places for growing.. before acorns everywhere.. then on walls ness.. fences ness.. and borders ness.. a lot of fear in our architecture.. so if *everyone where architects..t maybe that could be solved.. so perhaps to distribute the capability.. so no longer dead zones of imagination.. et al
ie: city sketchup ness.. iwan baan ness.. (if we let go and trust enough) .. to end dead zones of imagination ness
steve: to dennis.. cities that had pops of 200 000 were rare.. i didn’t find an ie of them saying they were egal.. so towns of that size would have been more hierarchical.. so thru structures of violence.. i think growing of food in 100 000 done collectively..
nika: there’s ie of linengrad.. millions of people.. not about food.. and they didn’t have tech at all.. so it’s about imagination.. question isn’t about how many people.. it’s how we imagine them
and about how we don’t keep nature from supplying us w our needs.. by tech/whatever that destroys it’s natural biodiversity.. back to the acorns ness
simona: on architecture being unique.. but they express ideas that were in the air.. an idea is partly what everybody understand and party a unique putting together of ideas.. reading a book about philosophical anthro.. and the crazy of this discipline.. crazy is anthro based on fixed idea of human beings.. the change in philosoph anthro is that we need to udnerstand human beings as process.. very connected w idea that *violence is stupidity.. allows you to get rid of work of interpreting relationships.. what people want.. takes you apart from collective ideas.. because you impose your order
again to michael hardt’s defn of revolution as instigating utopia everyday..
*again to the need for non hierarchical listening
simona: i cheated.. i finished the book.. i have a technique for reading long books.. start from last chapters.. so i know how it ends.. crucial idea is mutual aid, creativity, collective intell made of interpreting other people’s idea.s.. all of this is what power appropriates and disempowers.. not something the legislature/sovereign creates.. p 296 ‘in other words such simple econs are rarely that simply.. large .. rely on math symbols’.. there are many ways not just one to self org.. no need for just one form of org.. just as no need for one form of revolution
nika: i propose *next reading group about this ch.. so much in it.. ie: relationship between B and warlords.. and we haven’t covered that.. i think there’s a lot of beauty here about architect space.. maybe i can bring some of my architect friends.. because i’m spending my time now talking to them about how space changes social life..
huge..
again.. imagine if we ness.. so that we’re all architects.. every day a new.. again.. iwan baan ness as self-organizing ness.. et al
simona: reminder of next thursday’s spinoza.. jan 13 same time. whole book is less than 60 pages.. so just ch 1-5.. always start from the conclusion.. it’s that last .. unfinished work by spinoza.. lacking part on democracy.. that’s why tony negri wrote book about this
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to convos above and later on twitter.. esp in regard to thinking we need to engineer in some way.. in regard to our not letting go enough..
from murray bookchin‘s ecology of freedom:
249
but public space like inner space becomes mere empty space when it is not structured, articulated and given body.. it must be provided w institutional form, no less so than our highly integrated personal bodies.. which *cannot exist w/o structure.. w/o form and articulation.. there can be no id, no defn and none of the specificity that yields variety.. what is actually at issue when one discusses institutions is not whether they should exist at all but **what form they should take.. libertarian or authoritarian..
dang.. whalespeak.. sitting on edge of freedom.. but not letting go enough to be legit free.. oi oi oi .. all *this (structure, articulation, id, defn, specificity) yields is the variety of spinach or rock ness.. not discrimination as equity.. need to all be architects.. new everyday.. (m of care – jan 6) et al
**neither.. none.. freeman structure law (?) et al.. what we need is a means to undo all that assumed people telling other people what to do ness.. and trust every one of us.. from the get go.. let’s do this first: free art\ists (aka: all of us.. hari rat park law style)
quorums, consensus and please for participation are degrading, not ‘democratic’ .. they emphasize quantity as a social goal, not quality as evidence of an ethical community
any form of democratic admin.. killing us.. like saying.. let’s consensus our consensus.. voluntary compliance et al
251
finally i must emphasize that direct democracy is ultimately the most advanced form of direct action.. to exercise one’s powers of sovereignty by sit ins, strikes, nuclear plant occupations is not merely a ‘tactic’ in bypassing authoritarian institutions. it is a sensibility, a vision of citizenship and selfhood that assumes the free individual has the capacity to manage *social affairs in a direct, ethical and rational manners.. this dimension of the self in self management is a persistent call to personal sovereignty, to roundedness of ego and intellectual perception which such conjoined terms like management and activity often overshadow.. the continual exercise of this self.. its very formation by one’s direct intervention in social issues.. in asserting its moral claim and right to empowerment stands on a higher level conceptually than marx’s image of self id thru labor.. for direct action is literally a form of ethical character building in the most important social role that the individual can undertake: **active citizenship.. to reduce it to a mere means, a strategy that can be used or discarded for strictly functional purposes is instrumentalism in its most ***insidious.. often most cynical form.. direct action is at once the reclamation of the public sphere by the ego, its development toward self empowerment and its culmination as an active participant in society..
*whale affairs.. **oi informed populace/citizenry ness..
oh my.. oh my.. so unsettling.. any form of democratic admin.. claiming to free us more more ***insidiously binding us
252
the high degree of competence individuals have exhibited in managing society, their capacity to distinguish policy making from admin.. and their awareness of selfhood as a mode of social behavior .. all these traits will be heightened by a classless, nonhierarchical society..
oh my.. those aren’t even relevant in legit non hierarchical ness
we have no reason to be disenchanted by history.. even as most barbarous.. humanity has soured to radiant heights in great periods of social reconstruction.. once these burdens are removed, we have every reason to hope for degree of personal/social enlightenment for which there are no historical precedents.. (then on need to get back to mother infant relationship vs hiearchical/class societies)
yeah.. to no historical precedents.. hari rat park law .. maté basic needs.. et al..
we must try to create anew culture, not merely another movement that attempts to remove the symptoms of our crises w/o affecting their sources..
yeah that.. huge.. but counter to all the democratic admin you were praising p 249, 251, et al.. let go
we must also try to extirpate the hierarchical orientation of our psyches, not merely remove the institutions that embody social domination..
yeah.. all of us need detox.. ie: a mean to undo our hierarchical listening to self, others, nature..
huge
guided as we may be by the principle of equality of unequals, we can ignore neither the personal arena nor the social, neither the domestic not the public, in our project to achieve harmony in society and harmony with nature
yeah.. that’s all irrelevant if legit free.. ie: if we even just focus on them.. it’s an energy suck.. a distraction
to create a society in which every individual is seen as capable of *participating directly in the formulation of social policy is to instantly invalidate social hierarchy and domination
no.. rather.. it perpetuates it.. people are not legit free if you’re predetermining they do *that
total whalespeak/poison
253
whether we merely ‘situate’ our eco communities or root them in their ecosystems.. whether we ‘design’ them merely as part of a ‘natural site’.. (like a frank lloyd wright dwelling) or functionally integrate them into an ecosystem (like an organ in a living body) these choices involve very diff orientation toward technics, ethics, and the social institutions we so blithely call ecological..
organism as fractal ness.. huge..
we may reasonably question whether human society must be viewed as ‘unnatural’ when it cultivates food, pastures animals, removes trees and plants.. in short ‘tampers’ w an ecosystem.. ‘interference’ w natural world.. but all these seeming acts of ‘defilement’ may enhance nature’s fecundity rather than diminish it.. the word fecundity here is decisive and we could add other terms such as variety, wholeness, integration and even rationality.. to render nature more fecund, varied, whole, and integrated may well constitute the hidden desiderata of natural evolution.. that humans become rational agents in this all expansive natural trend.. that they even benefit practically from it in the form of greater and more varied quantities of food.. is no more an intrinsic defilement of nature than the fact that deer limit forest growth and preserve grasslands by feeding on the bark of saplings..
this is huge to m of care – jan 6.. acorns.. sans hand/mind focus
@monk51295 @sonmi451it “Nothing we do is better than the work of handmind. When mind uses itself without the hands it runs the circle and may go too fast; even speech using the voice only may go too fast.
Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/kennethcardenas/status/1479228833115086855
“The hand that shapes the mind into clay or written word slows thought to the gait of things and lets it be subject to accident and time. Purity is on the edge of evil, they say.” — Stone Telling, in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home
we have to trust (this is what doe and architects can help us with.. seeing how to trust all the ways.. but not how to set up a structure for it).. we need to let go of the takes a lot of work bs or we’ll never grok (acorn) enough ness
254
that humanity was expelled from the garden of eden does not mean that we must turn an antagonistic face toward nature; rather, it is a metaphor for a new eminently ecological function: the need to create more fecund gardens than eden itself
oh my.. opposite.. need to trust .. rather than keep thinking we have to create/engineer the dance.. we need to let go and embrace/trust the chaos/entropy of wild/natural biodiversity to be enough.. order/control is the poison
255
if human nature is part of nature, the associations that rest on universal human loyalties may well be expressions of a richer, more variegated nature than we hitherto have been prepared to acknowledge
yeah that.. we have no idea what legit free people are like.. black science of people/whales law et al
even more preferable that the blood related fam is the commune that unites individuals by what they choose to like in each other rather than what they are obliged by blood ties to like..
yeah that.. discrimination as entropy as equity
imagine if we just focused on listening to the itch-in-8b-souls.. first thing.. everyday.. and used that data to augment our interconnectedness.. we might just get to a more antifragile, healthy, thriving world.. the ecosystem we keep longing for..
what the world needs most is the energy of 8b alive people
on a still larger scale.. the commune composed of many small communes seems to contain the best features of the polis.. such larger or composite communes networked confederally thru ecosystem, bioregions and biomes, *must be artistically tailored to their natural surroundings.. we can envision that their squares will be interlaced by streams, their places of assembly surrounded by groves their physical contours respected and tastefully landscaped, their soils nurtured caringly to foster plant variety for ourselves, our domestic animals, and wherever possible the wildlife they may support on their fringes.. we can hope that the communes would aspire to live with, nourish, and feed upon the life forms that indigenously belong to the ecosystems in which they are integrated
yeah to ie: rp ness.. iwan baan ness.. bachelard oikos law ness.. but *this needs to come as the day from everyone (everyone a legit free artist/architect).. this is why takes a lot of work is such a huge red flag.. as are all the other red highlighted words above
decentralized and scaled to human dimensions, such eco communities would obey nature’s ‘law of return’ by recycling their organic wastes
more red flag ness
we could expect that work more craftlike than industrial, would be as readily rotated as positions of public responsibility; that members of the communities would be disposed to deal w one another in face to face relationships rather than by electronic means.. in a world where the fetishization of needs would give way to the freedom ot choose needs..
oh my.. so off.. so whalespeak
256
industrialization would be seen as an insult to human physiological rhythms.. it is not for us to describe in any detail how the communes of the future would confederate themselves and coord their common activities.. *any institutional relationship of which we could conceive would remain a hollow form until we knew the attitudes, sensibilities, ideals and values of the people who establish and maintain it.. certainly we, who have been saturated w the values of hierarchy and domination, cannot hope to impose our ‘doubts’ upon **people who have been totally freed of their trammels..
saying that freedom is how they *fill that structure in.. is poison.. don’t need nika’s step of physical architects first..
no one will ever be **totally freed.. if keep thinking we have to structure something for people first..
what humanity can never afford to lose is its sense of ecological direction and the ethical meaning it gives to its projects..
oi.. this is the exact poison.. that is keeping us from us.. from the dance
again from 253 – have to trust (this is what doe and architects can help us with.. seeing how to trust all the ways.. but not how to set up a structure for it).. let go of the takes a lot of work bs
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be you. 