Image: The Treachery of Images (French: La Trahison des Images) - 1929 painting by René Magritte.
My boat struck something deep.
Nothing happened.
Sound, silence, waves.
Nothing happened?
Or perhaps, everything happened
And I’m sitting in the middle of my new life.
– Juan Ramon Jimenez
This evocative poem has been haunting me for some time now. Although I do not own a boat, I feel just like the voice of the poet in this poem. Something profound and momentous has happened to me. But it wasn't any one thing. It wasn't any single event. Rather, it was a process -- still unfolding -- in which I am now decidedly in a new life. Nothing happened? No, everything happened and now I am sitting in the middle of my new life.
I like to say I am an eco-cultural philosopher. This came about gradually over a lifetime, but it began when I was but a teenaged boy, when I read books like Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac and E. F. Schumacher's Small Is Beautiful. (Later, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard and many others which situate our 'human drama' in relation to a biodiverse natural world.) These books set my sensuous imagination alight. I began to place myself in history and culture. And I began the lifelong -- and always ongoing -- journey of discovering where I am in time and place as a human Earthling. I also began to feel and think about the natural world in relation to history and culture, and I've been contemplating these things for all of these years. I'm now aged 56.
I'm not sure when my boat struck that deep thing. It's been a while. And I must say that there are plenty of times when it all just feels overwhelming, this new life. I cannot return to the old life. Something has flipped, and the shift of perspective is irreversible. I perceive differently now. I am no longer at all "mainstream" in my worldview, my cosmology, my understanding of where we are and what is happening. But the gap between my perceptions and understandings and the mainstream ones (the everyday, commonplace, conventional ones in 'my culture') has widened and widened to the point where it is as if my boat has struck a rock, and I can no longer see things in what many regard as the 'normal' way. I see differently. I feel differently. I'm in my new life.
This often hurts, as I am not so much 'in step' with the world around me. I am, in many respects, an outsider -- everywhere -- all of the time. I am a stranger in a strange land. At least in some very fundamental cognitive ways, I am. I am not much of a part of the dominant culture I dwell within, but am as from a faraway place, a land where people see, think and feel quite differently than most of the people around me.
Gestalt shifts, also known as gestalt switches, are most familiar to most people in relation to the images we have here. These are images which appear one way initially, and then, upon close examination, can flip, shift or switch so that the rabbit is seen as a duck, the beautiful young woman becomes an old lady, the vase becomes two faces which face one another, or vice versa. If you're like me, the large-nosed man playing the horn may be initially difficult to spot in the image of the pretty, worldly woman's face.
But gestalt shifts also occur in other ways, as in how we perceive and make sense of our world, ourselves, our lives.
At present I'm personally deepening into an ongoing gestalt shift in how I imagine and think about the word 'politics'.
I'm not only noticing that what most folks around me mean by the word 'politics' no longer suits me, but I'm also finding that the conventional, mainstream understanding of what 'politics' is has a very unhelpful consequence in how we think about, talk about, and practice politics. My concern here is, thus, with metapolitics. I'm interested in understanding how the way the mainstream (normal, conventional) way of understanding politics influences political practice (praxis) itself.
Here's Merriam-Webster Dictionary's definition of politics:
1 -
a: the art or science of government
b: the art or science concerned with guiding or influencing governmental policy
c: the art or science concerned with winning and holding control over a government
Now this fellow, a man without a name (apparently) -- who has a masters degree in anthropology (as he told me in an email) --, and who shares many of the views I have about politics, defines politics as "anything to do with decision making in groups". Notice, please, how much less constraining his definition of politics is from Merriam-Webster's dictionary. By his definition, if you and I and a few other people create a community garden together, that would be a political engagement. And I like this idea very much, because his definition of politics does not constrain politics to what governments do. Any group of people can enact their politics outside of governments, as far as he is concerned. And this is important because in ostensibly democratic nations, governments operate primarily on the basis of majoritarianism--, or, at least, make decisions on the basis representational 'democracy' where the majority chooses their 'representatives'.
What majority rule basically does is to limit and constrain minority viewpoints (theory and praxis) in how we live together. And here is one (among many) of the major problems with this majority rule phenomenon. It obstructs cultural evolutionary processes which depend upon minority viewpoints on how we may choose to live together -- or how we can actively participate in our social world. It does this on every scale of government, from your local city council and county government on up to the nation's capital (central, national government).
So long as we imaginatively constrain 'politics' to the Merriam-Webster definition, cultural evolution will tend to be stymied by the notion that we have to first attain majority agreement, and then we can experiment in cultural evolution--at any level of government. But you will notice that the natural world almost never works this way. For example, dandelions didn't come to be ubiquitous in North America by first populating just over half of North America. No. A few seeds germinated somewhere and grew. Then those plants matured and spread their seeds. And then the next generation did the same, and so on.
Beneficial cultural innovations tend not to be adopted by majorities all of a sudden. They tend, rather, to accrue and spread gradually, in phases which depend upon others witnessing and experiencing the benefits of the innovation. There are synergies at play, in which many people must attend to the conditions which are supportive of the innovation. I call such attending to fragile beginnings "nurturing cultural potentials" (or political engagement) -- and such nurturing depends on deliberate, collaborative cultivation of the conditions in which what is presently impossible becomes possible. This is very much like the practice of growing a vegetable garden. One must cooperate with natural processes to build fertile soil, bring in water, fence out rabbits and deer, etc. Vegetable gardens don't just appear all of a sudden by some form of wishful thinking magic. It requires informed effort over time. It requires political engagement.
Another crucially important reason we should not conceive politics as that which is limited to appealing to governments is that the entire modern world is essentially captured by corporate capitalist ideological propaganda of a sort which is resulting in the wreck and ruin of the biosphere and ecosystems. That is, those who essentially run the show (government) also own and control the media, the schools, the universities, and other institutions which serve as shepherds to cultural reproduction. And by "cultural reproduction" I am not delimiting the same to Pierre Bourdieu's unhelpfully constrained notion of it. He defined cultural reproduction as "the mechanisms by which existing cultural forms, values, practices, and shared understandings (i.e., norms) are transmitted from generation to generation." It is far better to define cultural reproduction in such a way as to also include how cultural practices are transmitted across spaces and places which are inhabited by people--, and not just through generations. Cultural reproduction is, thus, like vegetable gardening. You have to prepare the ground first. Then you can have veggies. What was impossible once becomes possible, but only through political engagement.
I will be concluding part one of this series momentarily, as I've spent most of my day on it and will be needing a break. But first I want to go back to the wonderful, intelligent and lovely nameless guy who made the video I linked to above. (His YouTube channel is well worth your attention and time!) At about 2 minutes and 10 seconds into this video he distinguishes "public" politics from "private" politics. And he does so in a perfectly adequate way--, except for one major problem. The problem is that he's repeating the mainstream and conventional (commonly habitual) habit of not acknowledging what I call "the third sphere".
The commonly recognized (mainstream) way of carving up social and political spheres (domains) is to number them as two and name these two 'public' and 'private". The public sphere has constraints upon us which are the constraints imposed by "the state" (all public politics in this schema is the politics of the state). The private sphere is conceived of as a private space of being and engaging in social life which is outside of the constraints which the state imposes. But it is the state which defines and delimits the private sphere's limited space of liberties.
There is a huge problem here which seldom gets mentioned, which is that the private sphere becomes 'mere' (meaning, being nothing more than). The constraint of conceiving and imagining the private sphere as 'mere' is that we typically do not treat the private sphere as at all a domain of politics, beyond the 'mere' domain of entertainments, private pleasures and personal preferences. So let us return to the community garden. A community garden is not merely a social space where "private politics" can be practiced according to mere personal preferences, like an entertainment or a hobby. It is not merely recreational. It may be a garden on privately owned land (legally held, perhaps, in a community land trust within the private sphere as the usual schema has it), but the apt term for this domain is neither 'public' nor 'private' but 'communal' -- and this is why I call such social spaces "the communal sphere" -- they are not merely personal or familial. Nor are they purely private or public. They are another social domain: the communal sphere. As such, following what is implicit here, political domains are not limited to just two domains, public and private, but fall into three basic kinds (not two!).
When our culture innovates its politics to recognize and honor "the third sphere" (the communal sphere) we will be able to begin to heal what is most broken in our ostensible (but pseudo-) democracies. What is most broken in our culture and its politics is the way it divides us from one another with illusory categories which mesmerize us and constrain our imagination of what is possible for us. The public and private spheres are domains of constraint which pit us against one another rather than to set us into cooperative and collaborative, mutually beneficial relationships which share power rather than to accumulate and concentrate it centripetally.
Liberties of every kind can emerge only where we are holding one another in care, in commons, in common.
If I say 'politics,' what comes to mind?
Thanks for listening. I'll see you again in part 2 of this series.