Patterning this paper. And a conceptual weave
A politics of language(ing)-of-struggle
Patterning. Left: A yew, 1,100 years old, in the churchyard of the Norman settlement of Sullington, under the South Downs in Sussex. The manifest patterning results from fluids being pumped, woody material being deposited, space filling and light seeking by growing wood-fabric and leaves, seasonal-generational expansion, seasonal weathering. The patterning appears like a storm, slowed, materialised and enduring: in a calm green secluded churchyard. Right: The railway station of a small town in the Pennines, West Yorkshire. The railway is here because the settlement was here, because the pass over the Pennines was here, because the river was here. The town is the town that it is today, arty and busy and self-consciously a haven, because the railway was here, running from city to city, Leeds to Manchester, bringing regular access from all parts of the railway network. The town also is a slowed storm – even if this picture fails to show it. Very few of these patterns were intended. Intentional patterning is order of some other kind, some other composite of kinds of work and contingency.
This is part 4 of Melancholy territory, activism in deep time and life in the collective – Dancing a living economy. One intention in the Methuselah papers is to (eventually) generate and continuously evolve a pattern language of making a living economy that powerfully supports activism beyond the fragments, and beyond the hegemonic present, into deep time. Thus we can close this introductory subset of papers by nominating some patterns (as patterns in triage) which seem to be implied by what we’ve identified in this introductory stream, and mean to explore in four papers to follow.
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.