Rifkin's sale pitch is a leaky vessel (not a road map for the future)

Tuesday, December 18, 2018

Compelling at first, a neoliberal Baby Boomer unpacks the horrors of the first two industrial revolutions, then amazingly offers us a third, requiring even more extractions. This, Jeremy Rifkin claims, is a "sharing economy." The manipulation of 'sharing' here is interesting to note. Governments and big businesses are requiring their subjects to become greater actors for two reasons: to share the responsibility of maintaining endless growth on an evermore finite planet, and to share the responsibility for the consequences of such economic idiocy.


This beautiful essay, Magic and the Machine (prepared as a podcast), can be considered an apt critique of Rifkin's fantastical Third Industrial Revolution managed by an autonomous and tumorous Internet of Things. But unlike Rifkin's sell, David Abram's is not a simple fix, it requires deeper listening, contemplation and a radical decoupling from salesmen.


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Trash news vortex (updated)

Wednesday, October 24, 2018

I could start my critique of this New York Times story with this image.



Looks profesh and serious, doesn't it. The font says, trust us, the photo brewing and mysterious. Seductive even. But it would be more honest to begin it like this.



The story, written by journalist David Maurice Smith (who also took the pics), begins with a pop out ad directing readers to SHOP NOW. We're not sure if Smith photographed the felted slippers too, it's not clear, but probably not. Smith's story travels along as a children's tale, identifying the perps "likely from Indonesia" and those who are being rescued "including sea turtles, dugongs and sharks." 

The nature of this fly in fly out journalism and the publishing realm it sits within seeks to sever the connection to the real perpetrators of this story – neoliberals who SHOP NOW, eat supermarket fish, buy their goods in plastic, and fly and drive around the world to see 'great' art.

While preparing this little post, which could be applied to any article appearing in any ad-funded news media, the title and title ad changed to this.



Fossil fuelled consumption is the great missing character in this story, consumption perpetuated by the world's rich who consume such media. Comfortable slippers and opera are the main events in the environment of the NYT online, a story about an Aboriginal mob's cleaning up of imperialism's wastes is just the fill. 

To finish with a pretty picture...


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Who gets to critique? Examining Mike Jay's Who gets to trip?

Saturday, October 13, 2018

Listen to Mike Jay's critique of Michael Pollan's How to Change Your Mind.



I think Jay makes a case in the end. However, from the point of view of someone who has read Michael Pollan's book, it appears he skim read it, looking for fault like a jealous co-reporter in the field. Jay's defensive skimming produces at times notable absences that could have strengthened his argument by citing a few key moments where Pollan unwittingly reveals his remarkable privilege (for example, his guided solo trips equating to hundreds of dollars, both flown and drove to like we're living in a time of endless oil and such finite resources are innocent and non-harming, could have been incorporated). But counter to an argument concerning privilege, there are many places where Pollan could easily attend to Jay's critique, as the latter misrepresents, collapses and generalises what has been researched (broadly) and what has been written (by Pollan and others). Jay's argument, finally, is worthwhile, for who in the future will be afforded a trip? but perhaps for naive reasons. Jay comes from a structuralist medical position, which goes something like: most people are victims of modernity, they are sick and they need taking care of. He is, for example, more concerned that Big Pharma won't be able to sell psychedelics (due to their unpredictability) than he is with the fore place of an imperialist-modelled pharmaceutical industry in society. A critique of the business model of pharmaceutical companies is absent here, like we should all go along with predator-capitalism where keeping people unwell with industrial food and medicine is key to the growth of these industries like privatised prisons grow numbers of prisoners. It's as though Jay believes industry-science is worthy of our continued blessing. As someone who rarely pays for his food and medicine, because it either comes from a garden ecology or a commons where foraged mushrooms (psilocybin and culinary) and the drawing on a great pharmacopeia of weed medicines are gathered for preventative reasons, Jay's argument has blind spots. It sits well within a somewhat smug urban realm of the LRB community, but it doesn't recognise the unavoidable fact we are all operating from an ideological place, which especially reveals itself when we set out to dismantle another's argument, as I have done here. Carbon privilege blind spotting extends to all of us who use the internet – the great polluter. Though tripping on dopamine hits from social media is nothing like brewing in a billy a tea of walked-for mushrooms, wattle and blackberry leaf and entering the imaginal realm of a creek-side ecology.

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The single global project for the Left (protection of local interbeing, commons, oikos)

Thursday, September 27, 2018

Frankly, I wouldn’t like to live in a stupid society where I would have to be all the time engaged in local, communitarian politics, and so on and so on. My idea is to live in a society where some invisible, alienated machinery takes care of things so I can do whatever I want. Watch movies, read and write philosophical books and so on... The problems we are confronting, we can list them in differing ways, but my point is they are all problems of commons. For example, ecology is clearly a problem of commons. Nature or natural environment is our commons, something that shouldn’t be privatised because it belongs to all of us. It is the background, literally the ground of our being. And it’s clear for me here we need to, erh, we need to reinvent, not local democracy but on the contrary, also large-scale solutions. The problem today is not local, not local communitarian democracy, the problem today is how [to] regulate trends worldwide. 


While Slavoj Žižek’s idea for communism is sensibly rooted in engagement with a present commons rather than dwelling in the failed communist projects of the twentieth century, his thinking here reveals deep conceits. What commons, who is labouring them, how are global human needs met without negating the call of local human and biotic others?
Žižek expresses himself with an anthropocentric-bourgeois worldview typical of many urban intellectuals – to live in a society where some invisible, alienated machinery takes care of things so I can do whatever I want. By urban here, I do not mean people who necessarily reside in cities, but rather people who are constructed or crafted by a hyper urbanised world making, or what I’ve called hypertechnocivility – human-centric institutionalism, machine dominance and extreme domestication. Within this limited place for thought there is little listening to the call of biotic others, and few lived examples of a truly shared world. World, to Žižek, must submit to the philosopher’s longings, which for him can be provided by large top-down solutions and alienated, world-destroying distribution systems to bring him his basic needs and comforts – movies and books and so forth.
Žižek’s project could be to speak of the codependency the local and global have with one another, but the local is perhaps too much too close for an ideas man. The 'local' demands relationships and listening much more than blowing ideas. With Žižek, ancestors and nonhumans are of course all relegated to the metropolis’s androgynous dump sites because alienated automation demands such consciousness. Any talk of making returns - regressions, digressions, decays and unmakings – brings scorn and accusations of noble savagery, romanticising indigeneity, pathetic fallacy, the typical attacks from urbane intellectuals on the Left and Right. In Žižek’s alienated city, wholly dependant on extraction and transporting in far away resources, no returns can be made, biophysically or culturally. Everything is a waste stream. Linear progress capitalism (free marketism) and linear progressive urbanism (identity politics) reveal a dim, almost nothing divider between Right and Left, funded by cheap crude oil, rolling out endless footpaths of domestication and monospeciesist thought. Essentially, both advance the global destruction of the planet in their very alienated linearities.
This is why Žižek gets attention. He’s good for the Right, so improbable and incoherent is his philosophy albeit clever and a novelty voice to spar with, and for the intellectual Left a relief there is a counter spokesbeing getting as much attention as Steven Pinker and other apologists for Enlightenment-triggered economic ruination of the biosphere. But really they are the same mens of their generation who lack any abiding care for the relationships required and laboured with within each local ecology. Žižek and Pinker et al are products of selfish-gene ideology, of a carbon-privileged educational training system. Ironically, the mother, mater, is null and void to such materialists. But declining oil deposits and other significant materials that have made the monster, Globalman, and which provides such grandiose illusions – bring me my movies and books, and while you pass the fridge grab me my originless, earth-destroying food – is a momentary affair with ancient sunlight and ancient bird shit. Yes, we’re also at peak phosphate rock, a critical ingredient of alienated agriculture – the brain fodder of hypertechnocivilians, Baby Boomers the first total alpha generation.
There is, however, some place of commune with Žižek in addressing privatised intransigence and exploitation of the biosphere’s innumerable commons. But contrary to Žižek’s boredom with the relational and listened-to local, the only global political project worth considering for the global Left (after it's done with its compulsive obsession with city focussed, carbon-privileged identity divisiveness) is the dismantling of the globalised destruction of local communities and environments. That is the globalised protection of infinite local environments, people and biotic others. If Žižek has a political project that addresses the problem of a systemic eradication of world commons, then there is coherence here. This inevitably must include the degrowth of money and the growth of relational economies, returning to localised gift economies between trusted kin and more formal barter with community others. Money can serve the realm of strangers and enemies, which needs to be no more than 30% of each local economy, which in turn pays for the global culture to protect from violence any local culture. This of course is the dissolution of the banks and debt-based finance.
 Until local communities – biotically diverse cultural communities – can make the call on behalf of their local biomes there will never be a proper addressing of species extinction, climate change or resource depletion, never a propper addressing of systemic pollution ideology so required for Žižek’s movies, books and alienated food and energy resources to be trucked to him from someone else’s commons.
The vast global project of local commons protection requires a rebirth of a politically loaded re-indigeneity, especially with regards to how we make economy and how we live with fellow species. This understanding is not possible as hypertechnocivilians. The global Left requires non-urbane voices to be listened to, human and biotic others, to work stridently beyond the frames and limitations of hypertechnocivility. The city universities of the world are generally too narrow in their scope to bare an intelligentsia required to mount the logic and scope of a deeply listened-to global ecosophy stating the protection of local biomes. Economy must return to a loved homeplace, replacing systemic militarised automation with biotic intimacy and the making of returns - gifts. The global project of the Left is to see to it that this is made possible. Everything after this vast project, if fulfilled, becomes a local matter – a return to relationship with each local mother.

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Playgrounds and prisons

Sunday, August 19, 2018



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Can a poet speak on economy?

This week I gave a talk as part of the La Trobe University Art Forum lecture series about how my solo work found its way into the all encompassing collective practice of Artist as Family. What happens when artists cease to be co-opted by an industry enframed by the imperatives of capital and augment new economic narratives? A radical-homemaking, permacultural-neopeasantry springs forth!


If this post has turned up in your inbox as an email subscription you won't be able to see this video.

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Permacultural neopeasantry and people care

Sunday, July 1, 2018

 Here is my Melbourne Free University (MFU) talk, in video (audio) form:



If you're reading this in an email, you'll need to click through to see the link.

A few thoughts since I gave this talk, where I became the subject of an unproductive ambush:

While the Left attacks itself over technicalities, different lifeways and language use – the very things that herald the potential for diversity – the Right runs away with the ball, laughing hysterically all the way to the banks. How we treat one another is key to a transition from dominating power relationships that aim to hurt and divide and towards a culture of true diversity.

The most destructive part of question time in my MFU talk was the product of a few people coming to the gathering with a will-to-violence that disallowed the possibility for deep listening. This is how violence establishes itself, it feeds on reductionism.

I wrote about the project of people care in Perma/Culture: Imagining Alternatives in an Age of Crisis. My chapter is called Reclaiming accountability from hypertechnocivility, to grow again the flowering earth (you can read it below), and it outlines approaches to understanding how violence, especially in language, be it privileged or retaliatory (or somewhere on the hierarchical scale), is a force for the destruction of the other who is not living our values. The ecological ramifications for humans endlessly attacking one another are of course innumerable. Business thrives on such hatred, which in turn creates assaults on ecology because consumption often ramps up when people are unsettled, shamed, angry, desperate or self-loathing.

To include the potential of the other in one's frame is a practice of understanding through deep listening. Buddhists and others might say it's the heart where compassion resides, but it really seems apparent now that the relationship between the enteric biome (of the gut) and the cortex-limbic biomes (of the brain) are where our social selves speak and act from.


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re:)Fermenting culture (audio version)

Saturday, June 30, 2018

I have recently recorded re:)Fermenting culture: a return to insight through gut logic 


as an audio book. 

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Poetics permaculture biomes and death

Friday, June 29, 2018

An excerpt from a talk I recently gave in Geelong...



You can watch the video I refer to here.

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Last swim 'fore winter

Sunday, May 13, 2018

Emu Bend, Franklinford, Dja Dja Wurrung country. Pic: Meg Ulman

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Permacultural neopeasantry in the burbs

Thursday, May 10, 2018

I have a forthcoming (May 24) talk in Melbourne as part of MFU's program. It would be great to see you there and join the discussion.

Modern Australia (in its very linearity) is a melting pot of cultural diversity forever being homogenised in an obsessive pursuit of progress. Neoliberal modernity lauds its one solution; one economy agenda, which is the shocking process of cultural, biological and economic pasteurisation that follows in the (gender-lopsided) footsteps of reductive science, social Darwinism and classical political economy. Peasants first, then First Nations people were labelled sloths and lazy by pundits of a so-called moral philosophy. Yet, for many of us, our old people (before the dispossessions, ecocides and genocides) lived carbon-positive lifeways and with intimate connection to earth processes. Acknowledging this past and drawing on it seems like a matter of pragmatic resilience more than moral altruism or romantic/political wishfulness. In an era of climate change (digi-industrial capitalism), ecological illiteracy (aggregating urbanisation), greater social divisions (reinvention of class relations), and human population explosion (chronic species loss), what stories and what lifeways can we action within the household and community economies? Patrick Jones (from Artist as Family) – living a neopeasant economy through the application of permaculture principles – offers not one solution, but a microbially-rich suburban response to the complex predicaments of our time.




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Ruffling the feathers of KeepCup scholarship

Thursday, April 19, 2018

Against ‘neo-peasantry’ and the desire for self-sufficiency, an article recently written in Overland, misses three crucial points: Neopeasantry concerns community-sufficiency, an abiding connection to ancestry, and modelling carbon positive futures. These three things have been crudely disappeared by Rachel Goldlust in this polemical writing parading as scholarship. 


Here is the reply we posted on the Overland site:
Hi Rachel, we are that family from Daylesford you mention. We would have been open to being interviewed, even a visit, it’s a pity you only refer to a new.com.au article as your main reference to us. 
In this writing you attempt to disappear our ancestors. Of course, ‘neo’ locates our ‘fessed up privilege in choosing to be peasant-like, but ‘peasant’ is our heritage, our families, our pre-industrial past prior to the enclosures and the ‘primitive accumulation’ of our ancestral lands.  
There is both an everyday intimacy and lived-politic that we’re advancing by championing this term. Our politic goes like this: If people can again have access to land they can produce alternative, land-conscious economies. They can decouple themselves from the giant wrecking ball global economy and potentially live a carbon-positive lifeway. We are modelling this politic every day. 
We don’t deny we’re on Dja Dja Wurrung country, we live that reality. We also don’t deny our own indigenous-peasant past and we draw on it to transition from what we call hypertechnocivility.  
Ultimately, we are neopeasants who apply permacultural principles to our home and community economies to further become accountable mammals of place, and this constitutes our practice of art, our culture making and our corporeal forms of feminism. 
Your article strikes us as another act of urbane violence directed at an imagined and clearly poorly understood target. We question your scholarship.

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Nuts, pulses, grains and fruit, KILL BIRDS!

Friday, February 16, 2018

The title for this post is a line from a neopeasant folk-punk song I recently wrote, which harks back to what I discovered in my doctoral research: that the production of nuts, pulses, grains and fruit require the wholesale killing of wild birds. No food, I have argued in many places before, is ethical if it is commercialised because money asserts a special kind of pressure on life that non-monetary gardening, farming, hunting and foraging does not. Business indebtedness to the money system applies an incalculable pressure on ecologies in order to guarantee the crop or harvest does not fail. If this means gassing, poisoning and shooting wild birds then that is what occurs, and my research has found this takes place on the smallest commercial farm to the largest. Various government agencies produce research surveying which wild critters negate monetised agriculture, such as this one. And this recent newspaper article demonstrates once again that commercial "vegan-friendly" food doesn't really exist.


Despite what members of the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance and others might espouse there is no ethical meat in Australia that is bought, and despite what militant vegans might advocate there are no ethical nuts, pulses, grains and fruit either. Food that isn't under monetary lock and key has a greater opportunity to be produced in relationship with the broader biome. Like many food industries including almond, peach, fish and pork, countless species (and relationships) go to waste in order to procure the one desirable harvest or produce one specific crop. This is the monological nature of monetised food. Of course, food labelling is so poor in Australia few really know what they're eating and certainly less know of the biome harm that is done to produce food.  

To bring this story home, we neopeasants net and scare off wild birds from our fruit and nut trees, and occasionally kill the odd raiding critter, which has the effect of deterring others. However, nothing of this taken life is wasted and with such lovely fruitarian flesh we make more life possible. For us all is food, all is life, all is the exchange of energy and matter from one form into another. Money corrupts this relationship and constructs wasteful industries. The so-called ethical food movement needs to radicalise and transition to non-monetary economies if we are to attempt to stop species decline, climate chaos and anthropogenic violence on the earth. 

While this may seem crazy to suggest in a certified capitalist society, viewed from the context of money's assault upon the living world (from small business to big), we have to start thinking whole-biome culture, which essentially requires macrobiome economy.

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Radical economy making - the imperatives of productive home economies for the reestablishment of ecological cultures of place

Monday, February 12, 2018

In this video I present a case for the home economy as the primary place from where ecological culture is remade, reclaimed and re:)fermented.



It is an excerpt from a talk I gave in Ballarat last week, with a surprise cameo appearance. Watch this video, listen to it as a podcast, and check out this quote from Shannon Hayes, redefining wealth and poverty:
For the Radical Homemakers, wealth and poverty are determined by a different paradigm. One of the first determinants of "impoverishment" was a lack of personally "owned" time  – life-hours lost to participation in soul-sucking work pursuing excessive desires and, ultimately, leading to neglected and disintegrated relationships. Other signs of impoverishment included the inability to access nourishing food, to get adequate rest, to properly nurture their relationships, or to live an ecologically responsible life. Understanding this new view of poverty, it becomes clear that the definition of wealth is far more complex than the mere accumulation of cash. In fact, in the eyes of most Radical Homemakers, money has little, if anything, to do with their perception of enduring wealth. – Shannon Hayes, Radical Homemakers: reclaiming domesticity from a consumer culture, 2010.

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