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Lifeworld and Abstract

We're The Great Old Ones Now

15:08 / 26.02.02

Rizla, forgive me for quoting you from the 'Garden' thread: quote:Gardening?
Someone say 'paradigm', or I'm outta here...

Political theories must give credit to the hands-on, the living, the specific. Abstraction gives us the option to generalise, theorise, recognise the system and its antecedents.

Without a due recognition of the actual, however, it's doomed to repeat the Stalinist terror: there are no castles Bolsheviks cannot storm, and that being the case, if you don't meet the quota you must be a saboteur.

I suspect that any genuinely revolutionary outlook (as opposed to a window dressing for some palace coup) will have to include space for craft of many kinds.

I touched on this long, long ago, when there was an article in WIRED which posited the development of a rootless manager class, moving from mall to airport to hotel to transport, making no real friendships outside a fleeting circle of business colleagues, apparently without connection to the lifeworld, the environment, the rest of us.

So, yes. Absolutely, gardening. Anything which fosters an understanding of the needs of the biosphere, which affords contact with the natural world, which brings politics to the realm of the final: if you don't care for this object, it will die.

15:09 / 26.02.02

Wow. I just wanted my jasmine to flower...

15:14 / 26.02.02

Rock on.

<lowers fist, grins crookedly>

Remember the ideology poll thread? I think the first thing I put down for believing in was composting and kitchen gardens. I wasn't being glib. That *is* my revolution.

I can knit socks, too. Come the nuclear winter, you're going to want a pair of these...

Less searchable M0rd4nt

16:24 / 26.02.02

I could dye the wool for Persephone's socks, me.

Yeah, having and tending a garden can make you more aware of the way in which you are connected to the world. Conversely, however, what I might call "conventional" gardening can give the illuson of being in contact with the natural realm whilst being, in reality, a source of environmental and social damage.

Just a few examples:

Pesticides/herbicides. Sources of pollution.

Peat. Brings your seedlings up a treat, but not very good news for dwindling peat bogs.

Cash crops: Certain flowers, such as the beautiful cyclamen, are grown as cash crops in the developing world.

And I would direct the board's attention to all the gardening ads that fall out of the Daily Mail. The trouble is that without some fragment of pre-existing political/environmental awareness a garden is just an extension of your house, another chunk of your territory; there's nothing about growing stuff that will necessarily trigger a mental connection between your garden and the world at large.

Having said all that: If this awareness does exist, even in the most embryonic form, then contact with growing things will only enhance it, as anyone who's been fortunate enough to watch the establishment of a "wild garden" will tell you. Keep your eyes open and you take away lessons that stay with you for a long, long time.

(And now you've gone and made me want an allotment again. Damn, I hate that.)

[ 26-02-2002: Message edited by: Mordant C@rnival ]

The Planet of Sound

17:35 / 26.02.02

I've mentioned the Tradescants in a previous thread; the father and son who invented the idea of 'gardening' in the UK. Without them, we'd be living in shit-filled streets of urban pooh-squallor. With weeds everywhere. As well as botanists and horticulturalists, they were avid collectors of curios, many of which are stored in the Ashmolean (which developed from 'Tradescant's Ark'), and all are fascinating.

Gardening, like architecture, is one of the finest manifestations of the human spirit. To all who fear Alan Titchmarsh or Dan Pearson or (erm) Charlie Dimmock, I say: Fie. Kew? Hampstead Heath? Duthie Park botanical gardens in Aberdeen? Think how poor our lives would be without these treasures...

17:37 / 26.02.02

Ooh, is tradescantia named after them?

The Planet of Sound

17:41 / 26.02.02

Um... yes. And other things.

19:59 / 26.02.02

Pooh-squalor?

Is that when Christopher Robin has an unfortunate accident in the Hundred-Akre Wood?

20:10 / 26.02.02

Urm, thread-rot aside, I really like your point/question, probably because it corresponds to my patterns of thought so neatly.
I generally feel that political theory and its teratomic offshoots into practice/implementation fail, and cause bloodbaths, because of the failure upon the part of the hegemonic ideogogues [the idea guys with guns] to realize that most people, and most things, don't believe in their paradigm, nor fit into it well. This becomes particularly true when canonization takes effect, such as the calcification of Marxist-Leninism in the USSR.

I'd say the great failing of most intellectual "-isms" is that first a model is constructed, then canonized, so that the non-correspondence of reality to the model is seen as a flaw in the people who don't fit the model's caricature.

20:12 / 26.02.02

It's for this reason that I put most of my time and intellectual energy into the formulation of grass-roots movements, which tend to have a better grasp of the dynamism between theory and practice. If none of you know about the socialist government in the Indian state of Kerala, it's a pleasingly successful example of what I'm talking about.

Less searchable M0rd4nt

09:14 / 27.02.02

Yerrrr. Kerala.

Bit lame, but the ideal of Kerala is something I keep coming back to in my head, like a homing becon or whatnot. Grass roots... and all kinds of other roots, too.

On a completely different tack: I love the way that a living plant can punch its way thru rock, or concrete. Magical. Hey, how long would it take the plants to wipe out London if we all fucked off tomorrow?

09:14 / 27.02.02

quote:Originally posted by Mordant C@rnival:
The trouble is that without some fragment of pre-existing political/environmental awareness a garden is just an extension of your house, another chunk of your territory; there's nothing about growing stuff that will necessarily trigger a mental connection between your garden and the world at large.

You know I never thought of it that way, but you're totally right.

All the more reason to start "the right sort" of people in the garden. Seriously, if I were in charge of the revolution --

--heh. If I were in charge of the revolution, we'd all still be hunter-gatherers. Worse, probably. The men would be the hunters and the women would be the gatherers. Probably.

--if I were in charge of the revolution, it would be required for every left-thinking individual to learn some craft. One, for practical reasons, if it ever gets down to a hunkered battle between us vs. them, you definitely want some people on your side who know where food and socks come from. Two, for philosophical-mystical reasons, I believe that "touching the earth" gives you strength and enlightenment & in my revolution, that's the ticket to paradise.

[off topic]Mordant, many's the time I've been tempted to start a thread in Creation about yarn arts...[/off topic]

09:14 / 27.02.02

Foragers with computers! Yeah!

From a somewhat Marxian standpoint, I think everyone should have to experience both craft labor and industrial labor, to gain an appreciation of what goes into consumer products and service industries. [which is entirely taken for granted by most Yanks, at very least]

We're The Great Old Ones Now

09:14 / 27.02.02

True enough, although what troubles me is that most theoretical structures take very little account of that recognition - as if it's somehow an emotional reaction in an intellectual frame. The observer myth is far more prevalent in formulations of societal construction than people seem prepared to acknowledge.

09:14 / 27.02.02

well that's writers for you, invested in the enlightenment notion of the writer as divine and very reluctant to even acknowledge the necessity of the death of the author and birth of the reader.

We're The Great Old Ones Now

09:14 / 27.02.02

Um...?

The Planet of Sound

09:14 / 27.02.02

Beginning to sound a bit William Morris 'arts and crafts' movement. But with vegetables. Cyber-vegetables. Anarchist- cyber-vegetables. Hurrah!

14:31 / 27.02.02

I suppose it goes without saying that my comment in Ganesh's gardening thread was meant to light-heartedly invoke a duality between Gardening as a symbol of homely middle-class contentedness and Barbelith discussions (ideal ones, rather than real ones that is) as symbols of cutting edge challenging new-ness, rather than implying any conflict between practical and ideological, um, stuff.

Anything that has as many weeds, sheds, spiders and rusty tools as yer. average garden is fine with me, plus they're nice places to run around and get fresh air. Or have barbeques. Hurrah for gardens.

Except that wasn't the point, was it?

Nick's entirely right of course - any kind of 'demolishing the entire system and starting again' style revolutionary plan would be a bunch of bollocks without practical schemes allowing for the continued production and distribution of food, clothes, medicine, building materials, fuel etc., all of which rise in one way or another from plants. So hurrah for gardens again.