immanence

Two things to consider before your morning coffee.

1) We are living through a Holocene collapse event,* when the nearly 12,000 year old regime of relative climate stability, the “comfort zone” for most of what we know as human civilization, is beginning to tear to shreds. (Here’s just one of the shreds from yesterday’s news.) It’s likely that climate havoc will grow, its extreme weather events and destabilizations creating the conditions for increased hunger, drought, heat waves, mass migration, disease, and warfare on a global scale. Those species that survive will eventually see a stabilization into a new “normal,” but any predictions about what that will look and feel like, or what role humans might have in it, if any, are premature.

2) Once you accept that, it should become clear that certain ways of living, and certain pursuits in life, are more worthy, more honorable, and more satisfying than others. The worthy ones will likely be focused on sharing (rather than hoarding) the joys of the world, fleeting as they are, and on devoting oneself to smoothening the ride for others. Ask yourself what capacities you can bring to easing the burden of what’s to come, then apply them as beautifully as you can. 

Now, enjoy your coffee.

The background to these promptings is that for the last three days I have been visiting, speaking at, and communing with a large group of thoughtful and creative people at a symposium hosted by the Ruigoord “free cultural space” outside Amsterdam, called Towards the Symbiocene?

“Free cultural spaces” (or “cultural freespaces”; see their declaration here) are places devoted to what we might call “cultural ecstasy” — a kind of autonomously self-organized, democratically minded, creative community life that tends to run up against the norms and regulations of states and municipalities. Ruigoord (pronounced something like “Reich-oord,” where the R’s are rolled and the “reich” is Germanic but with a guttural, vocalized “gh” instead of the unvocalized “ch”) is a kind of artist village that grew from a hippieish squatter community on a patch of land defended by its denizens against the development plans of Amsterdam’s port and petrochemical industries. It just celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. Over those five decades it evolved as a patchwork quilt of artist studios, gardens, makeshift homes (whose legality has been contested over the years), a beautiful church repurposed into a community center, a food forest, and a regular schedule of festivals and celebrations.

Ruigoord is part of a network of mostly European “free cultural spaces” that includes Copenhagen’s Freetown Christiania (the largest and best known), Užupis in Lithuania, and several others. They represent, to me, an evolution of Europe’s very active squatting cultures, whose analogues and relatives in other places range from (self-proclaimed) “temporary autonomous zones” like Burning Man and its smaller siblings, to longstanding guerrilla gardening initiatives in cities like New York City and Los Angeles, to aspirationally permanent intentional communities like Findhorn, Auroville, and The Farm (which tend less toward the anarchistic and democratic) and culturally more traditional autonomous regions like Zapatista controlled territory in southern Mexico or Kurdish Rojava in Iraq and Syria. They also bear a strong resemblance to the two communities I studied in the work that became my first book.

For all their (huge) differences, these places constitute bubbles of cultural and ecological autonomy amidst the layer cake of municipal, national, and international governance systems within which they fit rather like round pegs in square holes. Collectively, they represent the roundness as opposed to the squareness.

As for the Symbiocene, this is Australian ecophilosopher Glenn Albrecht’s term for a future of people living in symbiotic harmony with nature. Getting there from here requires changing a great many things, but Glenn believes that it’s possible and hopes that the current generation of young people can become “Generation S,” the generation that builds the Symbiocene.

Much of the symposium was devoted to exploring what the Symbiocene might mean, whether it’s in fact a good description of a viable future, and, if so, how artistic and other practices can contribute to it. A key point of debate arose between Glenn, who thinks we need to transition now, and that transition is possible; others who think his vision is unrealistic and that the future will be much less rosy; and still others who think we need a political revolution or some other kind of solution, rather than the piecemeal quests of harmony with a nature that is all too elusive and not at all reliable.

My take on the Symbiocene idea is as follows.

It’s the kind of vision that can be helpful for some, and perhaps for many people. It’s proving particularly inspiring for artists and designers, who seem to be attracted to the ways in which it suggests that humans can work with (not against) other species, and with new technologies, to develop “symbioses” that are creative, exciting, don’t produce waste, and help transform an unsustainable society to a sustainable one. In this it’s not that different from Thomas Berry’s idea of the Ecozoic, or the Ecocene, or any of the other ecotopian or “eutopian” (Glenn’s word) visions circulating among those who work toward them.

That said, like Timothy Morton and Jem Bendell, to name two others who participated in these deliberations (both remotely), I prefer to acknowledge that the challenges to getting “there,” if it’s even possible, will be steep and difficult. And like Erik Swyngedouw and Henk Oosterling, to name two others (participating in person), I tend to put more emphasis on the political dimensions of the transition. Symbiotic relations take time and effort to evolve, include a high degree of unpredictability, and are hardly guaranteed to satisfy all parties. To develop them will, in any case, require decision-making that takes place in political contexts. These contexts require forms of collective agency that we humans have yet to fully develop.

So I emphasize the historical contexts of coloniality and capitalism that shape the present, and the forms of democratic action and accountability that can shape the future. That future will have to be ecological and decolonial, or “Eco+deco,” in my rendering. Or it will be a mess. It is likely to be a combination of the two, Eco+deco and a mess, at best. (And at worst a big compost heap.) That shapes my eco-realism, which defined my book Shadowing the Anthropocene and which continues in my current writing.

Perhaps more important, as I suggested at Monday’s morning plenary, is that the changes we need to make are made not because of new information — whether it be concepts like “Symbiocene” or the many other terms Albrecht invents in Earth Emotions and other writings, or the “evidence-based hope” Elin Kelsey offered and the evidence-based doom counter-offered by Jem Bendell at Tuesday’s evening plenary. Rather, change occurs because of experiences that enable information to be processed and integrated.

These experiences are aesthetic, incorporating perceptions of what is beautiful and what is not; sometimes they are even “ecstatic,” in the sense that they take us out of our customary awareness of ourselves and the world. They are relational, involving others, including others that can be relied on to be there with us over time. (If we don’t have such others around us, then forget about changing our minds. Start instead by offering friendship.) And they are transformative, challenging concepts or identities or sensibilities that are already somewhat poised, or prepared, to be challenged, and offering ways of accepting those challenges. Information to support those experiences is important, but it’s the experiences that are central to changing people’s “hearts and minds,” so it’s better to put some effort into creating the conditions for those kinds of aesthetic, ecstatic, relational, and transformative experiences to take place. (Which is why the arts can be so important.)

Yesterday was the third and final day of the symposium and it was held at the legendary Paradiso club in central Amsterdam. While a few of the talks got to feeling a bit long-winded, and too TED talky for my taste, the artistic events were very special. In particular, last night’s culminating event — which followed a “Boat Liberation Parade” and a Free Cultural Spaces declaration/presentation to a city councilor at Amsterdam’s beautiful Spinoza monument — was a bit of a mindblower: a three and a half hour concert of dozens of musicians, some local and some international (including Indigenous elders and performers from North, Central, and South America) that left audience members, including myself, blissed out by their performative cohesion, improvisational fluidity, on-message power, and soulful genuineness. Here the symposium shed its wordcrafty intellectualism in favor of a melding of musical and inspirational elements recognizing real people’s actual struggles — for equality, autonomy, and traditions (new and old ones) of living in a “harmony” with land, with water, and with spirit that needs no new names or concepts, and that suffers nothing from the deconstructive exercises of my fellow academics. The performances made for a kind of “cultural ecstasy” that’s not exactly the norm for conferences or symposia.

I’m grateful to the organizers for inviting me (especially Patrick van Ginkel, as well as Aja Waalwijk and Mira Driessen) and for driving me around (Valal du Pon especially, as well as Jefta Hoel and Patrick), to Indira van ‘t Klooster for her impressive panel facilitation (given the sometimes clashing views expressed), to all the members of Ruigoord for the opportunity to experience their free cultural space, and to the others whose conversations with me made this event such a pleasure. I wish I could stay for the Landjuweel festival, which starts today and is really meant to make Ruigoord’s fiftieth anniversary, but it’s time for me to go home.

*Time wrote the Holocene’s obituary seven years ago. Events since then have more or less confirmed it, even if some geologists are still hesitating (since they don’t usually study anything that’s still happening).