Sunday, July 28, 2019
Homesteading and Social Drag Pt. 2
Previously we observed that the true nature of homesteading diverges from its popular imagery, and upon clearing some of the illusions surrounding it as a popular conception, resolved to further expand upon the meaning of it as a larger process.
However before proceeding to an expanded view of the issue, and then a wrap-up and conclusion, I'd like to take a brief detour.
There is a growing interest in going back to homesteading, or farming, or something similar, which can be seen as a desire to somewhat simplify one's life and move closer to the land and the nurturing processes connected with the land, such as making food, crafts, clothing, shelter, and all the rest. This is a clear reaction to the intensifying fields of destruction wrought by capital and industry in general, which has been growing and becoming more visible over several years, and really over the last decade, but which is by no means a new phenomenon.
But why the desire and the ever-increasing interest? I'd like to make sense of it, at least partially on the individual level.
Part of the motivation, as hinted at before, consists of the ongoing loss of power and disenfranchisement of the individual, and the ability of a given individual to affect the conditions of their own processes of production and reproduction. We should unpack this a little more.
As seen in the Marxist concept of fetishism, there is a power that emanates from the terminus of the chains of manipulation. The commodity holds a certain kind of power to the eye of consumer, a power that obstructs the actual nature of that commodity's production, that is, its nature as a product of dense social interactions. But this is a phenomenon that occurs more generally than the concept suggests, and is really everywhere.
The contractor becomes powerful after assembling together numerous materials of socially produced origin, while using tools and techniques which are also socially produced, but is nevertheless perceived to be powerful locally as an individual, because it is the individual putting everything together and doing the providing.
Similarly the householder is perceived to be powerful within the community or family for putting food on the table, however many hands in nearby or faraway places made that food possible. And so on across every specialization and level of organization, wherever there is an individual that helps to provide the community. It is this power, which by various means is being concentrated and pulled away from the average individual.
What is supposed to be a community of peers is transformed into a gauntlet of humiliations and degradations, as individuals in myriad ways can no longer provide for their peers while existing autonomously, more frequently needing to ask various permissions from increasingly powerful bosses, landlords, elites, and etc.
This socially painful situation is made all the more acute as the loss of local control amounts to universal and increasing destruction which is perceived to be emanating from distant and alien powers.
Revolution often marks a breaking point within the sum of these forces, in which there is a rebalancing of power at the various terminals of manipulation, which at least attempts to proceed toward a more even and stable distribution of this power.
A more even distribution of power allows individuals to subsist more autonomously with respect from their peers. It makes up the lifeblood of a healthy community in which there is mutual trust and respect.
Of course revolution manifests itself in many different ways, and though it is often conceived as sudden calamitous change, it can also grind on gradually as well, often leading up to those changes. One of the ways could very well be a growing shift into a homesteading lifestyle, however that may look.
If you take various manufactured ingredients and produce something, there is still power emanating from you. Though the source of that power can be traced to the sum of its parts, it is significant that one can produce something and provide something, however removed from the actual process of production is from the land itself.
So the movement towards the homestead is a movement closer to the base of production itself, away from all of the specialized and complex chains of production which are beset with avaricious middlemen and corroded trust. If one can no longer buy enough high quality food for example, one can at least attempt to grow it oneself, even if the growing is with manufactured tools and soil amendments. One is at least cutting out portions of the chains of production, taking back however meager portions of power in the process. Where is it all going? What does it mean?
However before proceeding to an expanded view of the issue, and then a wrap-up and conclusion, I'd like to take a brief detour.
There is a growing interest in going back to homesteading, or farming, or something similar, which can be seen as a desire to somewhat simplify one's life and move closer to the land and the nurturing processes connected with the land, such as making food, crafts, clothing, shelter, and all the rest. This is a clear reaction to the intensifying fields of destruction wrought by capital and industry in general, which has been growing and becoming more visible over several years, and really over the last decade, but which is by no means a new phenomenon.
But why the desire and the ever-increasing interest? I'd like to make sense of it, at least partially on the individual level.
Part of the motivation, as hinted at before, consists of the ongoing loss of power and disenfranchisement of the individual, and the ability of a given individual to affect the conditions of their own processes of production and reproduction. We should unpack this a little more.
As seen in the Marxist concept of fetishism, there is a power that emanates from the terminus of the chains of manipulation. The commodity holds a certain kind of power to the eye of consumer, a power that obstructs the actual nature of that commodity's production, that is, its nature as a product of dense social interactions. But this is a phenomenon that occurs more generally than the concept suggests, and is really everywhere.
The contractor becomes powerful after assembling together numerous materials of socially produced origin, while using tools and techniques which are also socially produced, but is nevertheless perceived to be powerful locally as an individual, because it is the individual putting everything together and doing the providing.
Similarly the householder is perceived to be powerful within the community or family for putting food on the table, however many hands in nearby or faraway places made that food possible. And so on across every specialization and level of organization, wherever there is an individual that helps to provide the community. It is this power, which by various means is being concentrated and pulled away from the average individual.
What is supposed to be a community of peers is transformed into a gauntlet of humiliations and degradations, as individuals in myriad ways can no longer provide for their peers while existing autonomously, more frequently needing to ask various permissions from increasingly powerful bosses, landlords, elites, and etc.
This socially painful situation is made all the more acute as the loss of local control amounts to universal and increasing destruction which is perceived to be emanating from distant and alien powers.
Revolution often marks a breaking point within the sum of these forces, in which there is a rebalancing of power at the various terminals of manipulation, which at least attempts to proceed toward a more even and stable distribution of this power.
A more even distribution of power allows individuals to subsist more autonomously with respect from their peers. It makes up the lifeblood of a healthy community in which there is mutual trust and respect.
Of course revolution manifests itself in many different ways, and though it is often conceived as sudden calamitous change, it can also grind on gradually as well, often leading up to those changes. One of the ways could very well be a growing shift into a homesteading lifestyle, however that may look.
If you take various manufactured ingredients and produce something, there is still power emanating from you. Though the source of that power can be traced to the sum of its parts, it is significant that one can produce something and provide something, however removed from the actual process of production is from the land itself.
So the movement towards the homestead is a movement closer to the base of production itself, away from all of the specialized and complex chains of production which are beset with avaricious middlemen and corroded trust. If one can no longer buy enough high quality food for example, one can at least attempt to grow it oneself, even if the growing is with manufactured tools and soil amendments. One is at least cutting out portions of the chains of production, taking back however meager portions of power in the process. Where is it all going? What does it mean?
But Reality
After a lot of holding the breath and focusing on various problems and issues, I find it useful to release for a moment and just breathe and open up again.
First: ideology is always a combination of reaction and creation.
This focus on our current relation to ecology is very much seated in reaction to what we have been doing for the last couple hundred years, and there are of course good reasons for this. If you're holding your hand over a fire and it begins to burn, it is probably a good idea to pull it back and reflect on that burning, and perhaps move to stop doing it in the future. And so as the various old life systems disintegrate under our collective political economic activities, it is certainly prudent to examine that process and consider how we can do better than the present course.
But observations and their corresponding judgments can easily run away from you, and focusing on them steadily increases their intensity and visibility.
For example, many things pummel the environment in various ways. I had mentioned that elk are good trail blazers, and indeed, they lumber through the forests crushing understory over and over again, tearing apart the surrounding foliage as they feed, and this is very much a normal process, at least within the current epoch, just as it is normal for geological events and the passage of wind and water to carve and transform the landscape over and over again as patterns shift.
So why the focus on our own violence to the landscape? As if we should play a perpetual game of "don't step on the hot lava," and tip toe around life systems in deep reverence to the lowest "weed" or insect or microbe, and then simply starve out and fade away as a result?
But our violence is a very different kind of violence as compared to the elk's. Its reach and its extent and its depth of material development is of a different quality altogether. And the sensitivity one strikes up to address this violence is all the more useful if one doesn't simply fill one's attention with it, and become lost in yet another ideology suspended and insulated from the underlying reality.
It is not necessary to shrink absolutely from the cycles of creation and destruction, and of life and death. But maybe shrinking a little bit is enough to adjust one's perception at least, and consider other possibilities.
And these observations themselves are very much cyclical. You can find all sorts of ideas like this throughout numerous writings over a long span of time. They tend to coalesce and become more visible, entering the mainstream and appearing more definitively in the collective consciousness in a given period, such as in the 60's and 70's, or the 10's and 20's further back, and so on, before being beaten back again and made dormant in their many isolated pockets. On and on it goes.
First: ideology is always a combination of reaction and creation.
This focus on our current relation to ecology is very much seated in reaction to what we have been doing for the last couple hundred years, and there are of course good reasons for this. If you're holding your hand over a fire and it begins to burn, it is probably a good idea to pull it back and reflect on that burning, and perhaps move to stop doing it in the future. And so as the various old life systems disintegrate under our collective political economic activities, it is certainly prudent to examine that process and consider how we can do better than the present course.
But observations and their corresponding judgments can easily run away from you, and focusing on them steadily increases their intensity and visibility.
For example, many things pummel the environment in various ways. I had mentioned that elk are good trail blazers, and indeed, they lumber through the forests crushing understory over and over again, tearing apart the surrounding foliage as they feed, and this is very much a normal process, at least within the current epoch, just as it is normal for geological events and the passage of wind and water to carve and transform the landscape over and over again as patterns shift.
So why the focus on our own violence to the landscape? As if we should play a perpetual game of "don't step on the hot lava," and tip toe around life systems in deep reverence to the lowest "weed" or insect or microbe, and then simply starve out and fade away as a result?
But our violence is a very different kind of violence as compared to the elk's. Its reach and its extent and its depth of material development is of a different quality altogether. And the sensitivity one strikes up to address this violence is all the more useful if one doesn't simply fill one's attention with it, and become lost in yet another ideology suspended and insulated from the underlying reality.
It is not necessary to shrink absolutely from the cycles of creation and destruction, and of life and death. But maybe shrinking a little bit is enough to adjust one's perception at least, and consider other possibilities.
And these observations themselves are very much cyclical. You can find all sorts of ideas like this throughout numerous writings over a long span of time. They tend to coalesce and become more visible, entering the mainstream and appearing more definitively in the collective consciousness in a given period, such as in the 60's and 70's, or the 10's and 20's further back, and so on, before being beaten back again and made dormant in their many isolated pockets. On and on it goes.
Monday, July 15, 2019
Care in The Wild
In a thick forest, it is the combination of both life and death that order the possibilities of passage and traversal for the living. One honors the fallen trees that serve as foot bridges over ravines and running and standing water, and which clear the path of various thickets and prickly plants that may get in one's way. One honors the dead leaves and decomposing plants which blanket the forest floor and suppress the dense foliage which makes travel more difficult.
And other living things affect the landscape as well. Elk and deer make excellent trail blazers themselves. They follow the rivers and climb uphill to safety, trampling down undergrowth and eating away the thickets of fern and other bushes, forming ready-made trails and clearings to travel more easily through. And the elk and deer are all too happy to utilize human-cleared pathways and human-engineered landscapes, such as by eating planted vegetation.
On the other hand, fallen trees can also block pathways and make certain terrain impassable if they are a large enough size. And living plants that may block certain passages may hold together soil on slopes and keep one from slipping. And then there is the very simple reality that it is life itself which keeps other living things consuming and moving. And further, life can easily present an obstacle in this way too. You won't get very far after surprising a bear on the trail for instance, or being stalked by a hungry mountain lion.
Here one is surrounded by living things that carry on with a logic completely independent of one's care or control. Where there is a vitality and flourishing of life, there is a dense field of suffocating claims to being, constantly being contested in some regions, and then remaining stable and nurturing in others.
Will scents and sudden loud sounds change the eating and movement patterns of elk in the area, for instance? What of the plants that I've just trampled down, or the scurrying insects as I scrape the earth scrambling up a steep hill? Nature is plenty resilient of course, but such an environment does evoke new sets of considerations.
It is the contestations, and these sets of considerations, which are completely swept aside in the industrial built environment, and it is meant to be this way. The strong and durable materials which are used to build all manner of infrastructure and habitation, and to establish security and constancy in this environment are intended to shape and mold the forces of nature and hold them in place where desired, and neutralize their threatening aspects, and insulate against their many effects, and so on.
As an extreme example, the gated community or even the average suburb can appear as a stable and quiet oasis of peace at its endpoint, its finished point of development, but which masks the massive interconnected processes of rending and crushing - not only on material levels, but also social, economic, political, spiritual, etc. - that were required to produce it. And so a phenomenal distance opens up between the experience of this fabricated peace and the turbulence that was required to produce and maintain it.
For someone like me, upon becoming lost in the wilderness, this distance can appear in a clap of thunder. Lost and bewildered in a field teeming with life and opportunity, and faced with the prospect of not getting out of it, the sight of a road can bring forth overwhelming feelings of joy and relief. It is a testament to the sheer advancement of this civilizing process that one looks upon this plane of relative destruction - of the clearing of trees and understory, the mining of rock and the production of asphalt, and the pulverizing of the earth's surface - and sees some sort of savior.
And other living things affect the landscape as well. Elk and deer make excellent trail blazers themselves. They follow the rivers and climb uphill to safety, trampling down undergrowth and eating away the thickets of fern and other bushes, forming ready-made trails and clearings to travel more easily through. And the elk and deer are all too happy to utilize human-cleared pathways and human-engineered landscapes, such as by eating planted vegetation.
On the other hand, fallen trees can also block pathways and make certain terrain impassable if they are a large enough size. And living plants that may block certain passages may hold together soil on slopes and keep one from slipping. And then there is the very simple reality that it is life itself which keeps other living things consuming and moving. And further, life can easily present an obstacle in this way too. You won't get very far after surprising a bear on the trail for instance, or being stalked by a hungry mountain lion.
Here one is surrounded by living things that carry on with a logic completely independent of one's care or control. Where there is a vitality and flourishing of life, there is a dense field of suffocating claims to being, constantly being contested in some regions, and then remaining stable and nurturing in others.
Will scents and sudden loud sounds change the eating and movement patterns of elk in the area, for instance? What of the plants that I've just trampled down, or the scurrying insects as I scrape the earth scrambling up a steep hill? Nature is plenty resilient of course, but such an environment does evoke new sets of considerations.
It is the contestations, and these sets of considerations, which are completely swept aside in the industrial built environment, and it is meant to be this way. The strong and durable materials which are used to build all manner of infrastructure and habitation, and to establish security and constancy in this environment are intended to shape and mold the forces of nature and hold them in place where desired, and neutralize their threatening aspects, and insulate against their many effects, and so on.
As an extreme example, the gated community or even the average suburb can appear as a stable and quiet oasis of peace at its endpoint, its finished point of development, but which masks the massive interconnected processes of rending and crushing - not only on material levels, but also social, economic, political, spiritual, etc. - that were required to produce it. And so a phenomenal distance opens up between the experience of this fabricated peace and the turbulence that was required to produce and maintain it.
For someone like me, upon becoming lost in the wilderness, this distance can appear in a clap of thunder. Lost and bewildered in a field teeming with life and opportunity, and faced with the prospect of not getting out of it, the sight of a road can bring forth overwhelming feelings of joy and relief. It is a testament to the sheer advancement of this civilizing process that one looks upon this plane of relative destruction - of the clearing of trees and understory, the mining of rock and the production of asphalt, and the pulverizing of the earth's surface - and sees some sort of savior.
Saturday, July 13, 2019
Constrict
The narrower single lane bridges tend to force some moments of cooperation. Yes there are some moments of turbulence in which opposing drivers tussle over right of way, but most of the time people are polite and are moved to a wave of thanks to each other in letting each other pass.
The two lane road allows for a more seamless passage of opposing traffic to be sure, cutting down on social friction. But with a seamless and frictionless passageway comes a fading of contact with the other.
The two lane road allows for a more seamless passage of opposing traffic to be sure, cutting down on social friction. But with a seamless and frictionless passageway comes a fading of contact with the other.
Standards
There is a common shape that emerges from milled lumber as mass-produced saws cut through varied shapes and sizes of logs, producing the desired square building materials with the dependable straight lines that make repeated conjunctions of materials faster and more dependable, such as in timber framing and other construction disciplines.
What are the desired thicknesses which allow for the most efficient and effective usage of the materials, and what are the thicknesses that, given the natural properties of the material, provide the stability needed to build in the forms desired?
How are all of these things judged and measured? So they presuppose various social modes of measurement and the conventional tools for affecting that measurement, such as measuring tape and levels and all the like.
It is the intersection and the combined pressures of these things: the conventional and wide availability of a given tool and that tool's form, the properties of the materials, the desired forms those materials and constructions take, the efficiency and repeatability of those elements in a greater mass, and all of the rest of it which intersect and provide the emergence for eventual timeworn standards, which are readily seen in the common forms of mass-produced commercial lumber.
And these things appear in the knowledge base. A collective memory is maintained. It then takes less time and energy by cutting out the nearly endless hours of trial and error required for them to emerge. The path of least resistance is taken; a channel is cut.
What are the desired thicknesses which allow for the most efficient and effective usage of the materials, and what are the thicknesses that, given the natural properties of the material, provide the stability needed to build in the forms desired?
How are all of these things judged and measured? So they presuppose various social modes of measurement and the conventional tools for affecting that measurement, such as measuring tape and levels and all the like.
It is the intersection and the combined pressures of these things: the conventional and wide availability of a given tool and that tool's form, the properties of the materials, the desired forms those materials and constructions take, the efficiency and repeatability of those elements in a greater mass, and all of the rest of it which intersect and provide the emergence for eventual timeworn standards, which are readily seen in the common forms of mass-produced commercial lumber.
And these things appear in the knowledge base. A collective memory is maintained. It then takes less time and energy by cutting out the nearly endless hours of trial and error required for them to emerge. The path of least resistance is taken; a channel is cut.
Forage
Through foraging, one develops an affinity for the edible and medicinal plants that make up one's allies. But this affinity casts into relief the disregard for those "weeds" and those nameless scores of plants one tramples underfoot traversing the forest, which before then remained invisible. And one takes this awareness back to the garden.
One can't know every last plant, or at least have an affinity for every last plant, as oneself and one's affinities have to take up space too. Where edible and medicinal plants must be cultivated, less desirable plants have to be removed, as nature abhors vacuums and one has to enter this state of nature mid-process.
Through foraging and gardening, one seeks to keep plants alive and safe, say by picking off bad leaves or harvesting what one can without destroying the plant, unless the whole plant must be pulled up whole. And one knows in one's heart that pulling up a plant by its roots - unless its a transplant - necessarily dooms the whole plant, whereas simply pulling off leaves or fruits can allow for regeneration and recovery.
But the tenderness for ally plants and the pain for removing undesirable plants can exist side by side. That everything is precious does not preclude that some of it must thrive or subsist and some of it must go. This seems a healthier spiritual relation to the earth to me at least.
One can't know every last plant, or at least have an affinity for every last plant, as oneself and one's affinities have to take up space too. Where edible and medicinal plants must be cultivated, less desirable plants have to be removed, as nature abhors vacuums and one has to enter this state of nature mid-process.
Through foraging and gardening, one seeks to keep plants alive and safe, say by picking off bad leaves or harvesting what one can without destroying the plant, unless the whole plant must be pulled up whole. And one knows in one's heart that pulling up a plant by its roots - unless its a transplant - necessarily dooms the whole plant, whereas simply pulling off leaves or fruits can allow for regeneration and recovery.
But the tenderness for ally plants and the pain for removing undesirable plants can exist side by side. That everything is precious does not preclude that some of it must thrive or subsist and some of it must go. This seems a healthier spiritual relation to the earth to me at least.
Feeling and Living
How we feel about a given modality of living becomes expressed in the idea, which guides our material labors, giving shape to landscapes and habitations which act on the living systems around them which live and feel them. And those things act on us and influence how we feel about the modalities of living in turn.
Energy and Necessity
The movement of energy presents a necessity and an inevitability that must be reckoned with, not negotiated with. Where there is no energy, there is death, and where there is too much energy, there is also death, and so on.
This is most clearly perceived in the body and in the emotions: to the rational mind, death may be an abstraction, but there is no mistaking pain, or dread, or terror. With an abundance of energy, something like the mind is allowed maneuverability within an enlarged field of inevitability.
The temporal and spacial abundance of that range of energetic frequency that allows for life provides the basis for manipulation, choice, and maneuverability. With enough power that is satisfactorily developed over a long enough time, even greater concentrations of energy can be set against lower concentrations to produce desired effects, such as maintaining a fire between walls of stone.
So power is not just concentrated energy, but manipulations of different gradations of concentrated energy to maintain that stable frequency of life-giving energy. And with the abundance of power, where it is at least distributed with a reasonable evenness, things like our contemporary understanding of "freedom" and "choice" can be perceived to exist and act.
This is most clearly perceived in the body and in the emotions: to the rational mind, death may be an abstraction, but there is no mistaking pain, or dread, or terror. With an abundance of energy, something like the mind is allowed maneuverability within an enlarged field of inevitability.
The temporal and spacial abundance of that range of energetic frequency that allows for life provides the basis for manipulation, choice, and maneuverability. With enough power that is satisfactorily developed over a long enough time, even greater concentrations of energy can be set against lower concentrations to produce desired effects, such as maintaining a fire between walls of stone.
So power is not just concentrated energy, but manipulations of different gradations of concentrated energy to maintain that stable frequency of life-giving energy. And with the abundance of power, where it is at least distributed with a reasonable evenness, things like our contemporary understanding of "freedom" and "choice" can be perceived to exist and act.
Choose
Technologies, stores of knowledge, arenas of action, and all of the rest all present channels for which energy to travel, and out of which emerge all kinds of different kinds of achievements and effects. And all of these things interpenetrate each other to amplify each others' efficacy. How much of each and what kind of proportions and mixtures? One has to choose.
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