Permapoesis is the portmanteau for permanent making. A term I've developed, incorporating permaculture principles, shared Aboriginal knowledges and our own neopeasant lifeways to help reclaim sensible thought and remodel ecological economies of material accountability.
My most recent book, re:)Fermenting culture can now be listened to as a non-monetised audio book. Just click the pop out below. Gifts in exchange for this labour are most welcome, and in some form will be passed on in what I call a flow of gifts economy.
My name is Patrick Jones. I live and labour on Djaara peoples' country. Dja Dja Wurrung is the first language of this land. I acknowledge the six Djaara seasons and pay homage to the regenerative economies upon which Djaara living culture sits. The spirit and logic of which my household draws upon in our everyday productions and lifeways while simultaneously drawing upon our own indigenous peoples through story and the ancestral plants, animals, microbes, mushrooms and uncapitalised medicines that have also emplaced on this country. We recognise the system of racism that terra nullius continues to instil in the dominant culture, and recognise that as people of many diverse white cultures we still hold cultural blinders that our historical trauma sits within and (now) our privilege stands upon.
Here are some of my books. The bottom two can be purchased from me direct, however if you're moving to a non-monetary economy I'll post you one in exchange for a gift of your making. Please feel free to suggest an exchange by emailing me (click above 'Contact me' tab).
re:)Fermenting culture (2017) Sold Out in hard copy
Email me to receive a PDF, or click below for audio.
Click the 'Pop out' to listen to re:)Fermenting culture (or click through to download audio file)
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.
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.
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.
