Four zones of reach, four invitations from melancholy territory

Futures past. Left: not so long ago people thought the future looked like this. What d’you reckon to their vision? An Italian Futurist pram, encountered in a street in Siena, through which crusaders would leave the city at Porta Camollia, for Rome and the Holy Land. The wall behind the pram tells a better future story? Right: going back a ways . . King Ashurbanipal (Assyrian ‘King of the World’ 669–c.631 BC ) projected this as the future or, more accurately, as an eternalising present. The low relief demonstrates to all who see, how powerful the king is, twisting the tail of the lion – who seems to have other opinions. Lions were routinely marshalled for him to slaughter, proof of his divine right; his regime and dynasty fell, of course. The ruling ideologies and oligarchs today would have us adopt a similar image of their (‘our’) power and dominance over natural order. What do we reckon to their vision?

This is part 3 of Melancholy territory, activism in ddep time and life in the collective – Dancing a living economy. Here I’ll say how I mean to take forward the exploration flagged in this four-part paper, in four further phases (four papers, four invitations from melancholy territory). Each is oriented around one of the zones of activist reach that were outlined in the preceding paper The scope and reach – in-here, out-there . . as follows.

Landscapes of material engagement, power(s) and zones of reach in activism

Landscapes in-here, out-there. Left: as near as my camera can get, is infrastructure in-here, as encountered in the teeming street market in Ballaró, Palermo. Not the heart-mind, but perhaps once the material habitations of heart-mind in some of our fellow mammalian beings. As we normally would say: guts and lights. Right:  infrastructure out-there. Again, an approximation: because infrastructures per se are huge and ultimately unknown, tacitly and practically defined by whatever connects with-and-within them, evolutionary, over horizons and beyond intentions. This image shows tokens of intentional infrastructures in Granada: saneamiento, abastacimiento de agua, bomberos. One of our modernist delusions – most notably in the field of digital materials – has been to kid ourselves that infrastructures, even if made from steel and concrete (let alone instantly re-writeable algorithmic infrastructures of software code and so-called artificial intelligence), can be made thus and made to operate thus. They are wild, self-assembling, wilful, secretive, mycelial, tentacular, bottomless.

This is part 2 of Melancholy territory, activism in deep time and life in the collective – Dancing a living economy. In that title I name melancholy territory, deep time, and life in the collective, and I present them as three kinds of landscape in which living – thus, activist living – can be conducted. Fleshing out these notions now in this paper . . . I understand these three kinds of landscape to be, respectively aesthetic, material and cultural. Sometimes I refer to them, for brevity, as §1 (material)/§2 (cultural)/§3 (aesthetic).

All the reach that can be visioned and sustained

I find I’m in a journey in a large and heaving landscape: both personally, in a life, and as a member of the quote-unquote 'post-war' baby-boomer cohort. It’s something I need to write about, for both personal and collective-activist-generational reasons; for purposes of day-to-day navigation and for continuing mobilisation. I’ll start from two experiences – that's the kind of thing I'll persistently do here, because that's how in fact it is, this living – and move along from these, exploring and travelogueing, in the blog I’m initiating with this paper here.

Why 'Methuselah papers'? OK, it's a joke. Methuselah is a biblical patriarch and figure in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, who lived to 969 years: the longest life of all human beings, in the line from Adam to Noah.

To have Methuselah pinned at the head of the page, as we write or read this paper here, is a persistent prompt to beware patriarchy, delusions of continuity or bloodline, clinging and craving, factionalism and essentialism, a Promised Land or a Chosen or any other kind of supremacy; mythologising, cultural hegemony and adherence to any Book and priesthood.