A BIRTHDAY DECLARATION

One thing folds out of another, thus all the “post” philosophers: post-structuralism, post-colonial, post-what-have-you-got? that have dominated a lot of thought. Here’s what the wikipedia volunteer authority (unnamed) has to say: “a tendency in contemporary culture characterized by the problem of objective truth and inherent suspicion towards global cultural narrative or meta-narrative. It involves the belief that many, if not all, apparent realities are only social constructs, as they are subject to change inherent to time and place. It emphasizes the role of language, power relations, and motivations; in particular it attacks the use of sharp classifications such as male versus female, straight versus gay, white versus black, and imperial versus colonial. Rather, it holds realities to be plural and relative, and dependent on who the interested parties are and what their interests consist of. It upholds the belief that there is no absolute truth and the way in which different people perceive the world is subjective.”

These guys wear those sweatshirts that say on the front, “Question authority!” Some looked at the back (“Listen carefully to the answers.” Note plural.) Some authorities (!) said that it wasn’t a rebellion against what came before so much as it was an extension of the thinking of some people who came before, and about all you can do is name the people mostly in France (Derrida, Foucault, et al) but also in Italy and even a few elsewhere. In 1982 when I left seminary, they were just beginning to hit their peak.

I wasn’t ready for the shift, unless you count Thomas Kuhn, who defined paradigm shift (the point when the evidence against the standing order has accumulated so convincingly that everyone goes to a new understanding -- like the shift from theism to science, which is not quite finished). I was forty, my reality was challenged, but I loved both structuralism and narrativity. Now, thirty years later, I’ve found Deleuze and Guattari who turn out to be an excellent entry point for me.

For instance, Nick Lane’s understanding of what he calls “Ascending Life.” I’ll go finish the book as soon as I finish this post. I have two chapters left. Notice that he converts the noun in the “Ascent of Man” to “Ascending” and is not anthropocentric. In fact, his account of evolution is largely about the invention of life itself and most of the evolving is done at the single cell level, where things reverse, hop sideways, fuse, gobble each other in an orgy of change that continues on without much attention from us until now. He describes an entity that has 28,000 “sexes” -- meaning they can copulate in various combinations to create entirely new creatures with unique genetic scripts -- at which point he suggests maybe we need a new word for the category. Humans are limited to maybe a double-dozen variations, including people with XY chromosomes, XX chromosomes, YY chromosomes (they die), XXY, YYX, upside-down versions, partial versions, etc. Post-binary but not unlimited because if the plan gets too far away from the norm, it’s erased. That erasure is as important to evolution as is war or competition for resources, but only with instruments can we see it. It’s all based on electrons and we still aren’t sure exactly how to describe them except by their behavior.

Because so many people in my family have had head injuries (you can include Bob Scriver) and because I’m old enough to see the consequences play out, I’m aware that the identity of people is dependent on their frontal lobes. Disease or stroke can do the same kind of damage as a blow or a fall. Yet sometimes only the people closest to the damaged person can really “see” the change unless it’s major. Now I’m reading Michael Gazzaniga and

thinking about Leda Cosmides’s work, trying to understand exactly how it is that identity arises from not just the brain but the whole body. Long ago I converted to the idea that identity is not from a “soul” residing in the brain, which is mostly what we can get to through introspection, and that identity changes all the time, which leads to problems with relationships -- or does it solve them?

My trusty guides are largely at edge.com, the same folks I loved in young adulthood. I still protect my worn “Whole Earth Catalogue.” It’s remarkable that people my age and much younger still continue the back-to-the-land communal practices of those times, except that now many of them are on-line. They have gone from being "social fossils" (which they never were anyway) to self-confident networks, rhizomatous, as DeleuzeGuattarian thought would have it. They preserve the boundary between the hunter/gatherers and the ten-thousand-year-old experiment with agriculture and cities that sometimes burdens us. In the beginning much of civilization depended upon the expanding and protecting of population because of granaries and walls: a lot of people with time and safe space for thinking. Now the biggest "cities" are “virtual.” The online “cities” are bigger than any resource-bound city can ever be and more assorted as well, which means richer, deeper, more complex thought explorations. I have better access to more brilliant people now than I had on the campus of the University of Chicago.

So now I can return to the task I set myself there, which is something like “the re-enchantment of the world.” That is, the most basic level of reconciliation and rejoicing between the planet and the human body/brain. I’ll close with this quote from Art Durkee, which he posted as a comment to yesterday’s blog.

“Shamanism is the single most rhizomatic spiritual technology, or set of practices for dealing with the spirit world. It's an utterly pragmatic, local system. Yet it turns up in literally every culture, in every era, in some form or another. Often it takes on the local language and cosmology without really changing its essence.

“That's partly because it's rooted in earth, in sky, in the land, in the people. The organized religions are smart when they adopt the local practice and try to subsume it into their own systems. That works better in some places than others. In native North America, the Jesuit presence among the early explorers was a political policy, part of the policy of conquering a new land for Europe. It's interesting to note how some native groups, who nominally converted to Catholicism, still practice their old ways anyway. Rhizomes, growing up and spreading invisibly below-ground.”

I do not want to be a shaman. I do not want to join any organization. I do not want to convert people. I want to read books and write about them. On to Michael Winklelman. But first I’ve got to get tarps on the roofs of the bunkhouse and garage. After I finish reading Lane’s book and copying his bibliography. Busy day. Every day is a birth-day.

DON'T FRIEND ME, YOU SOB!!

By now I rarely read a book or watch a movie without also Googling to read about the author, the circumstances, the reaction and so on. In fact, this goes back to Alvina Krause’s demand that we develop a character for acting by ransacking their circumstances and gripping their place in history. It’s the way I survived Div School courses like “Modern Thinkers” (which we nicked “modern stinkers”) because one cannot understand Paul Tillich without seeing the times (Hitler) that pushed him centrifugally towards the edges of Christianity while his heart held him centripetally bound to the center. One cannot understand Freud without understanding the Vienna of his times, which he took to be reality. (Well, hardly, my dear!)

So in wading through these Stieg Larsson Millennium mysteries (I’ve read all three now, though I only heard the first one read aloud), I find that he is in fact explaining his real-life opposition to the forces of Evil -- specifically stigmatization and persecution that erode democracy -- through inquiry journalism. Tying this into the reading I’m doing about Deleuzeguattarian system thought, I see that what he specifically said in “The Girl Who Played with Fire” was that criminal enterprise is not always (or perhaps anymore) a matter of a big overarching crime syndicate. (Even the Pope is admitting he’s not running a monolith. And there’s a fascinating article in this month’s Vanity Fair about the hundred-ring-circus the US presidency has become. Tim speaks of “all the little mafias.”) It wasn’t until I began to read the reviews and watch the YouTube interviews that I realized how much Larsson was also trying to redeem small individual (rhizomatic) struggles against injustice through the paradigm of a lone journalist and the small resistant figure of Lisbeth Salander. They are not lovers: they are co-warriors.

Our society has become more than ever a free-for-all in which crime, like many other phenomena, follows the rhizome structure: many small spontaneous nodes only loosely connected. What Larsson adds is that these little criminal enterprises are not run by brilliant or exceptionally evil minds, as the movies would suggest, but are more often just clusters of the human weeds of society growing in empty lots on broken ground. Stupid, ugly, malformed and uneducated, they are criminal simply because they can’t think of anything else. It’s there and it’s easy. He was not guessing: he had investigated.

I keep a close eye on Adam Curtis’ blog. His most recent post included a link to a video made in 1973 about Hell’s Angels in England. That’s not really what it was about: it addressed young, uneducated, unsocialized, unmotivated men hanging around getting into trouble. http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/ . It is not an accident that most of them are from stigmatized minorities with no education or marketable skills. The American solution has been to put them in jail at enormous cost. The criminal culture finds them useful. Our prisons are seminaries (seedbeds) for crime.

Turning over a small notepad, intending to write a shopping list on it, I discover this list of five things on the cardboard back:

1. Absolute truth claims.
2. Blind obedience.
3. Effort to establish an ideal time.
4. End justifies the means.
5. Declaring a “holy” war.

I don’t remember when I copied this down or from what. Might be the characteristics of Fascism, or Fundamentalism, or simply Dictatorship. They’re not all that different. And they certainly describe the self-righteous and finally Evil nature of the little renegade group within the Swedish secret service that tried to crush Salander.

The characteristics on this list do not account for the kind of Evil that comes from the “left,” the forces sometimes labeled “liberal” that are intent on doing what they think is Good, through regulation and control. Or do they? In fact, the missionary zeal for improving everything often pulls them into this same list. (They are the origin of “penitentiaries,” meant to be places to become penitent.) The problem is that the enormous body of complex rules and regulations that do-gooders are constantly legislating are all based on the assumption that they know what the world should be like -- like THEM. I read in the NYTimes today that Facebook has a new feature: you press a button and can see the exact location of all your friends so you can hail the nearby ones for a cup of coffee. They describe this as “nice” and “social.” Lisbeth Salander might define it as stalking.

The rhizome idea is that many small centers of thought and action are superior because they are more likely to be organic and related to the real local ecology. Looking for the “head” to kill (which has not succeeded in the case of Al-Quaeda) is less effective that improving the environment that encouraged the formation of terrorists in the first place -- usually through poverty, stigma and exclusion. The ground surge of this idea -- which organic gardeners and holistic health advisors have known for a long time -- has now begun in military circles. Hopefully the great consolidating ideas that have afflicted schools and ag systems lately will be abandoned in favor of of “local” rhizome networks in healthy environments that do not depend upon endless regulations and inspectors who never get around to inspecting, if indeed there are enough of them funded, properly trained, and immune to corruption.

Here are quotes from an article in the Atlantic that is supposed to be about the World Wide Web now dwindling in the face of “apps” (which I don’t understand at all). The quotes might also apply to the current struggle over economic theory and other social developments like gay marriage.
http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2010/08/whats-wrong-with-x-is-dead/61663/

“Too much scholarship has shown that technologies and systems are (messily) shaped by social movements and events and governments, political ideas and freak accidents.”

On the contrary, I think there still has not been enough scholarship (or maybe journalism) to convince people this is true. There’s very little awareness of how UNcontrollable spontaneous grassroots movements can be and how they can transform the world. I watched the 6-part YouTube video about Jack Kerouac last night and am still thinking about Bill Burroughs’ assertion that the “Beat” movement changed the planet, even penetrating the “hermetic” society of the Muslim world. Like Bin Laden. I consider this good, by the way.

From the Atlantic again: “We have made [technology] an all-purpose agent of change. As compared with other means of reaching our social goals, the technological has come to seem the most feasible, practical, and economically viable. It relieves the citizenry of onerous decision-making obligations and intensifies their gathering sense of political impotence. The popular belief in technology as a--if not the--primary force shaping the future is matched by our increasing reliance on instrumental standards of judgment, and a corresponding neglect of moral and political standards, in making judgments about the direction of society.”


Alexis Madrigal, the romantically named author of this article, has my attention. As much as Stieg Larsson did in his novels. So much to read -- so little time.

THE RHIZOME'S STOLON

“In biology, stolons (from Latin stolō "branch") are horizontal connections between organisms. They may be part of the organism, or of its skeleton; typically, animal stolons are external skeletons.” [replication by mitosis]

“Stolons are shoots that bend to the ground or that grow horizontally above the ground and produce roots and shoots at the nodes. The term, "stolons" is often used in describing the botany of lawn grasses. In contrast to stolons, rhizomes dwell underground.”

“Rhizomes are used as storage structures for nutrients.”

I think I pretty much “get” deleuseguatarian rhizomes (or if you prefer, plateaus). The advantages (and disadvantages) of smaller roughly equivalent nodes as structure compared to a “tree” top-down hierarchy are clear to this veteran of congregational polity. (Unitarians are independent congregations who collaborate through an association -- which constantly tries to impose uniformity and hierarchy, all the time protesting that it is not.) This leads me to consider what the connections among the groups might be like.

Between 1982 and 1985 I WAS the connection among the Unitarian fellowships of Montana which normally, because of distance, had little or no connection to each other or even to the district or national and international offices. The four groups that I served, as well as the two I did not, were all ostensibly of the same faith group (though sharing freedom of religion beliefs is rather different than being Catholic) but slightly different in practice, so that a person used to one group would be slightly off-kilter in any of the others. Economics and ecology were at the heart of those differences.

Two groups were university-based, so their members-per-population were higher, but one was “the” liberal arts university and the other began life as the “cow college”. Missoula considered itself highly sophisticated in its sequestered valley. Bozeman was frankly athletic in its own much higher valley. Helena was the state capital with many bureaucrats looking for a personal community base. Great Falls was both agricultural (grain and beef) and military, which didn’t always mesh. The railroad and smelter had left by the time I was there, but I doubt that they brought in many members anyway.

The UUA was underwriting this circuit-riding experiment and their premise was that by connecting and nourishing these small groups, I could make them “grow.” In the end their goals were the same as Louis Hill and Paris Gibson, who wanted enough tax-paying and crop-shipping people out there to support a railroad and a town of merchants and banks. That is, the UUA wanted me to promote the interests of the UUA, which were dues income and prestige. This wasn’t ideological so much as just practical. It certainly wasn’t ever expressed frankly to either the congregations or myself. The experiment lasted three years, which both fulfilled and exhausted me, and was probably blocked for a while afterwards by the depression of those years which keeps popping up in comparisons with the most recent couple of years.

The connectors (“stolons” in botanical terms) I used were myself and my message, which I repeated four times, twice a Sunday; the newsletter I put out once a month; and statewide events. It took me some months at the beginning to develop what kind of variation on the denominational message (formal principles) would work in Montana for all four groups. It took the whole three years of our grant to get down past the decorations to the heart of the matter: friendship community among a group of real people with affinities as well as status in the larger community. I’m not sure they recognized the second part themselves. They did understand the community part and the three year plan helped that aspect very much. But as a person who rejects “status” in most social contexts, I was not helpful except that I was very low cost and attuned to the local. Status is expensive.

My experience with rhizomatous community is strong. Probably the earliest was family, and then next a neighborhood friendship group among women who started meeting for games and dessert when one of the sons committed suicide by hanging in a public park. He was our paperboy. The women meant to support the mother through her grief and had enough momentum to last until most of them had moved away.

The most glamorous example of rhizomes was repertory theatre, partly in the academic scene of Northwestern University and partly as summer theatre at Eaglesmere, PA. The “stolon” that connected the two was Alvina Krause, a famous acting coach. I was only a costumer but it drove the idealism deeply into me and associated it once-and-for-all with the idea that there are no small parts, only small actors.

The example that dominated our family was my father’s job as a field man for an ag wholesale co-op. Like my circuit-riding gig, his task was to be the “stolon” among the many small ag co-ops of the Pacific Northwest. Some grew into major organizations, like Tillamook Cheese and Gresham Berry Growers. The wholesale co-op itself gradually became much more of a corporation and the bitterness of that also accompanies me in my thoughts, since the focus shifted from the original purpose to cash profit -- not growth in depth and meaning. Marketing.

Today I live in a village which operates as a cooperative except that no one wants to do the work of maintenance because it takes time and puts a target on one’s back. In a way my blog acts as a stolon, because I attend the town council meetings, take notes, and comment on this blog. The worst enemy of rhizomes, in my political understanding, is being secret. I want them daylighted, which is where I part company with revolution. I want evolution in response to situation. So part of the duty of the “stolon” is to carry “nutrients” (information and response) back to the rhizome. Still, I am against the violation of privacy and know that “uprooting” families and businesses can destroy them.

My last romantic example of rhizomatous organization is the Blackfeet tribe in its position as a sovereign entity. Beginning as “gens” or loose collections of people -- family and territory based -- they have evolved into a tribe conceived and defined by outsiders who want to impose a “tree-shaped” corporation model and who have some success in creating an oligarchy. Fascinating to watch, painful to be in.

Such metaphors are only useful if they are abandoned when they don’t fit, but this rhizome idea is strong and necessary help in resisting the flattening and harrowing by the media, underwritten by corporation/government collusion.