the overextended memotype

When we look out at the sky at night, we’re also looking back into the past. The light from distant stars takes so long to reach us that we cannot really be sure that, in reality, they’re still there.

Although the myriad things that surround us on Earth – rocks and rose bushes and panda bears and grapevines and pigeons and people and rivers and grass and grasshoppers and bluebottles – are each much closer to us than the stars, there is also a sense that, in catching sight of them, we are seeing them as they were, not how they really are. There is a sense in which we are surrounded by ghosts.

A ghost species is one that, while its members might seem plentiful today, has already accumulated an extinction debt. Extinction debt is a term ecologists use to describe the unavoidable future demise of a species – or a large percentage thereof – due to events in the past. So we are haunted, by the ghosts of orangutans, black rhino, Rufous-headed hornbills, blunt chaff flowers, candelabra trees and a million other species we do not yet even know. May never know.

Even if the struggle to preserve these species was not massively impeded by corporate and state hegemony over the natural world, even if we could shut down all the logging trucks and feedlots and coal-fired power plants and tar sands operations tomorrow, even if every single car was removed from the road, these accumulated debts must still be paid. For many species, countless billions of living beings, it is simply too late already.

To fully comprehend this is to be struck by a profound sense of hopelessness, coupled with dread. If we cannot tell ghost from living being then how many other species might be haunting us. Are butterflies still real? African elephants? Bonobo chimps? Us?

The night sky suddenly seems a whole lot darker.

We also harvest ghosts, both in time and space. Ghost acreage – millions of years of accumulated decayed matter transformed into fossil fuel along with millions of acres of still-fertile land in the poor but resource-rich areas of the world – has given us an entirely false sense of the sustenance available to us. And so there is a phantom carrying capacity that haunts us too – a vast, amorphous emptiness that we seem almost compelled to try to fill, not recognizing that it expands in direct relation to our hubris. Like a housing bubble.

And the bubble continues to expand, past fundamental planetary boundaries: stratospheric ozone, land use change, freshwater use, ocean acidification, aerosol loading and chemical pollution, climate change, biological diversity and nitrogen and phosphorus inputs to the biosphere and oceans. We have already overstepped the last three, and all the boundaries are deeply connected.

There is also one other thing that haunts us. Something that gives rise to all these other ghosts. We are haunted by possibility.

In some ways this is the curse our species carries: to be aware of not only the immediacy of the material world around us but also of the intensive flows and processes underlying this world; of the possible connections we might make between things in order to create something new; of the infinite becomings we can set in motion. As human beings, then, we see not just the actual world but also an intensive world of lava flows and climactic variations and social unfoldings and extinction debts, and also a virtual world, consisting in the real possibilities embedded within each thing, each being, each connection.

It can be exhilarating to think of the world in this way – to be imbued with this creative power of affect. Lately, however, we have largely forgotten how to be affected. We have learned to change the world without in turn being changed by it. And when we stop being changed by the world, our creative capacities are stifled and stratified. We begin entrench one set of pathways of change between us and the world and assume that this is the full range of possibility. As these pathways become more regulated, we define structures and systems and regulatory mechanisms, and to support them we construct abstractions – complex philosophies and tortuous justifications; finally, in our artifice and confusion, we cede our power to all these.

The singular capacities we each have to create, to change, are sublimated into an acquiescence to the power held over us by abstractions. By Capitalism. By the State. By progress. By the dominator myth of humanity ruling over the natural world.

As we learn to become subservient to power; as through discipline and control we become its loyal subjects, we also reproduce our relation to it in our engagements with everything and everyone around us. Where there is difference between us, we turn it on its side to form hierarchies – between genders, between races, between species, and we are forced by the structures we form part of into hierarchies: of class, of ability, of belonging.

But what if these structures, even these highly elaborate, seemingly infinitely extended loci of power, were themselves little more than particularly enduring hallucinations? Perhaps there is always an outside, always an excess of creative power and power cannot help but produce its own resistance, its own lines of flight away from the overcoding and axiomatizing of the whole of society and towards the open field of possibility. Even other animals resist. Even gorillas have taken up rocks against encroaching humans. Even elephants have liberated captured buck under cover of night. The history of power and control is then also a history of resistance.

Throughout this history, resistance has taken countless forms and delineated routes of escape across all scales: mass uprisings against the injustices of the current order, personal refusal, utopian poetry, the carving out of small niches of temporary autonomy, the creation of unprecedented artforms, the mapping out of subterranean liberatory networks, struggles for recognition by those lower down on the hierarchy, the pulling up of GM crops, the smashing of automated looms and the torching of bulldozers by the elves in the forest.

And, most recently, occupation.

From the eclectic nature of participants, whose sheer diversity of age, race, class, gender and opinion undermines everyday notions of what ought to constitute affinity, right through to the prefigurative, leaderless ethic that seems to emerge so naturally in the interactions of all those who engage it, Occupy remains a conundrum for anyone who insists on describing it in the language of left or right, social democratic or neoliberal, socialist or capitalist, reformist or revolutionary. It is a  fundamental challenge to the hegemony – the very reality – of these a priori terms and categories, a call to extend the range of social and political possibilities beyond arbitrarily imposed limitations.

As Noam Chomsky observes, “the smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum – even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”

So to occupy is not to fall in line with a party line. It is not to have ideological unity. It is not just subcultural. It is not born of privilege. To occupy is to resist. To resist the life that has been set out before us, to resist the dull alienation of the spectacle, to resist this culture of separation, specialisation, compartmentalisation, domestication. It is to enter, however tentatively, the field of possibilities that for some of us haunts our waking moments more and more.

To occupy is a defiant act of togetherness. It is not based on the logic of calculation and acquisitiveness. It does not share the ends of the dominator culture. It is not an act of submission. It is solidarity. It is a coming together. It is an invocation of the intensive flows and processes underlying the actual, a destabilization of the current regime, a shift away from equilibrium through which we might catch sight of the virtual.

To occupy, then, is, like all the very best forms of resistance, to confront headlong the crisis of imagination between what is and what could be. As Murray Bookchin says, “the assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking.” To truly resist is to challenge this assumption. It is to subvert the paradigm of representative democracy, of capitalist relations, of forced participation in our own oppression. To question the legitimacy of the institutions that stand in for us. To deny their hegemony. To no longer countenance the injustice of representation.

At their very best, when they are aimed in the direction of what could be instead of pandering to what is, occupations and other forms of resistance turn hierarchies back on their side in order to acknowledge the productive differences between us; to see what emerges from their intersection. They allow us to explore the creative tensions between what is and what could be. Resistance, occupation, is solidarity. Mutual aid. Voluntary relations. Equality. Freedom. A reclamation of our personal power. Anarchy.

We can now begin to get a sense of why so many people from so many walks of life have, for all its faults and limitations, come to feel so deeply, viscerally connected to Occupy: it is a recreation of the real community we have all but lost, a powerful reminder of our shared being, our togetherness on this fragile planet. It is a call to join in a vital conversation about where we – as individuals, as communities, as a species and as one small but highly consequential part of a once-thriving, now severely threatened bio-community – should go from here.

Or, as the Chilean poet Jesús Sepúlveda puts it, it is the planting of the first seeds in our cultivation of a garden of peculiarities. Whatever grows out of occupation, or whatever new forms of resistance arise, we should all heed this call to cultivation, whether we choose to plant in the full light of day or illuminated only by the ancient light of distant stars.

I will end with a quote from Sepúlveda:

“The garden of peculiarities is a project of humanity. Its visualization consists of realizing the peculiarity of nature. If the original consciousness grew as a result of the recognition of its own death, liberating consciousness will grow as a result of the recognition of its own peculiarity. Life as we conceive of it today will not be erased from the planet as long as we don’t give respite to the empire of “sameness.” The point is to learn to live in the planetary garden without control or authority. And if life is a voyage, it is necessary to let ourselves be carried along with the river’s current without imposing a control to stop it. The current of the river is the current of nature. The social current, standardizing and “mediocratic,” is the electricity of control. To continue in this vein is to die of stress, alienation, anxiety, insanity, hunger, exploitation, repression, and misery. In order to run the rapids it is necessary to learn to live.

When one follows the silvery movement of each tumultuous and savage drop of water, one is creating contact with the rhythm of the natural world. To follow this cadence, avoiding the rocks is a wise act. To fall from the raft is evidence of discomfort. This discomfort is the incompatibility between control and life. Control engenders fear and impedes life. It unleashes paranoia. Life, on the other hand, offers beauty and ingenuity as its native fruits. It depends on us to bite the apple and to learn to dream.
The voyage to the garden of peculiarities is one without return. To listen to the murmuring of civilization, once on the correct path, is to fall into the trap of fear. It means losing one’s way, because the only exit is the escape hatch to the highway that leads to the asphalt of standardization. And while every creature needs a dwelling, it need not be made of concrete. The true human lair can be a cabin in the forest that together with other cabins forms a community of peculiarities. Or it can be a neighborhood that tears up the pavement of idiocy and isolation while leaving one or two routes among other neighborhoods. Each constellation of peculiarities will be a kind of commune that guarantees the horizontal autonomy of each community. Only in this way can hierarchy be abolished. And as social practice between social beings, ritual festivities and community celebration will be an integral part of the strategy to combat accumulation. In this way, all surplus that will eventually be created will be enjoyed as a part of the collective carnival.

The garden of peculiarities is a wager made for the conservation of the environment and the survival of the human race. There intuition should light the way. Not being sidetracked depends on us. There is only one path that leads to the heart of life.”

“The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking.” – Murray Bookchin

There is something significant in how the forms of collective action and the underlying ethos of the Occupy movement have been misunderstood and misrepresented. For critics, there’s something deeply discomforting about the conceptually slippery and seemingly unprecedented nature of Occupy and it invokes a reactionary fervour to prematurely categorise and dismiss. For many would-be supporters, it is simply an opportunity to assert their own agendas – to interpret this emergent, grassroots phenomenon through their own ideological lenses of liberal democratic reformism, old-school Marxism or even, in some cases, tinfoil hat conspiracy theories. Occupy, however, continues to elude easy capture by the usual terms of analysis and debate even as it engages with familiar topics like service delivery and economic inequalities, and it is precisely here that its real power lies.

From the eclectic nature of participants, whose sheer diversity of age, race, class, gender and opinion undermines everyday notions of what ought to constitute affinity or solidarity, right through to the prefigurative, leaderless ethic that seems to emerge so naturally in the interactions of all those who engage it, Occupy remains a conundrum for anyone who insists on describing it in the language of left or right, social democratic or neoliberal, socialist or capitalist, reformist or revolutionary. It is a  fundamental challenge to the hegemony – the very reality – of these a priori terms and categories, a call to extend the range of social and political possibilities beyond arbitrarily imposed limitations.

This is more than a simple appeal to creative solutions or ‘out of the box thinking’. As linguist and political analyst Noam Chomsky observes, “the smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum – even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”

In other words, by forcing us to push beyond the parameters of acceptable debate if we are to understand or meaningfully participate in it, the Occupy movement affords us an important opportunity to disrupt the seemingly unassailable edifices of economic and political power at their very ideological foundations and, by extension, to pose a serious challenge to their legitimacy. At their best – and perhaps this partly explains the remarkably far-reaching resonance of the call to Occupy -  the spaces this movement opens up, spaces bearing a remarkable resemblance to what Hakim Bey once called temporary autonomous zones, encourage each of us to become active participants in the creation of a new shared terrain that reflects the prefigured values of equality, solidarity, liberty, mutual aid and consensus. These values manifest so freely and naturally in our interactions within these spaces that it’s hard not to wonder why ‘normal’ social relations are structured so differently – why competitive individualism, alienated consumption and dull resignation to the powers that be comprise, for far too many of us, the majority of our distracted waking hours.

And it is in this, perhaps, that we can begin to get a sense of why so many people from so many walks of life have come to feel so deeply, viscerally connected to Occupy: it is a recreation of the real community we have all but lost, a powerful reminder of our shared being, our togetherness on this fragile planet. It is a call to join in a vital conversation about where we – as individuals, as communities, as a species and as one small but highly consequential part of a once-thriving, now severely threatened bio-community – should go from here.

While this conversation might still sound dissonant to some, full of rhetoric and confusion and bearing the scars of many thousands of years of hierarchy and oppression, borders and wars and the whole grey spectacle of modern life, if we listen closely we can just about make out the subtle harmonies and delicate melodic counterpoints, the shifting tempos and complex rhythms and even, if we concentrate just a little harder, the very first and faintest suggestion of a vast crescendo.

It is hard to pinpoint the exact beginning of this endlessly rising canon of occupation, but we know one thing for sure: we are finding our voices.

NB: This is an updated version of an old article titled ‘it ain’t easy being green’.

Introduction
Few people now deny that many of the essential natural systems that sustain all life on Earth are profoundly threatened by human activity. Among countless other horrors, vast expanses of richly biodiverse rainforest have been decimated to make way for crops planted for livestock feed and biofuel, the use of fossil fuels is at an all time high, the world’s oceans are fast being depleted of fish, water shortages are imminent in many parts of the world, the global food supply is threatened by GMOs and the atmosphere itself is thick with pollutants, affecting the climactic stability of our entire planet.

Even if we ignore the troubling fact that some ecologists are calling this intersection of catastrophes the Sixth Great Extinction Crisis, the effects on just our species are alarming, and include global political instability and conflict, displacement, famine, an increase in exploitation in so-called ‘developing’ countries, epidemic levels of psychological illness and vast economic inequalities.

It is no exaggeration to say that the next decade will offer humanity both its greatest opportunity and its greatest challenge; how we choose to respond as a global community to these and other pressing issues will have immense consequences for our shared future and what kinds of lives – if any – we are able to lead on this planet. In the face of all this, however, it seems as though our defining moment of global solidarity currently amounts to little more than ineffective posturing.

We all care about these issues. We all want to do something to slow down the ecological crisis and we’ve all – those of us who are privileged enough to be able to – tried hard to make at least some of the changes advocated by mainstream environmentalists: we’ve installed low wattage lightbulbs in our homes, we buy less plastic bags, we try to eat ‘organic’, we recycle, and some of us have even sought out fuel efficient cars.

Should we then feel guilty when we’re told that, collectively, these measures will not make a substantial impact, not even if every last one of us drove a Prius and had a solar geyser?

The problem is threefold: first, capitalists have seen a new gap in the market and have attached all sorts of dubious green rhetoric, aka ‘greenwash’ to their products; second, most of the spokespeople for green ‘activism’ are married to the idea that market forces alone will suffice to save us, strengthening the drive of the green marketers and illegitimating any more radical actions; third, some of our habits are so deeply entrenched that few have actually realised that they can and should be changed. All these factors combine to give us an entirely false sense of how we can really make a difference.

So what can we do if we are serious about living ethically and reversing the tide of ecological devastation? The environmental movement has several different answers to this question.

Light Green Environmentalism
So-called ‘light green environmentalists’ (‘LG’s’ for short) see environmental protection as a personal consumer responsibility and thus ask us to simply make responsible consumption choices.

For instance, given the fact that the global livestock industry is the single largest cause of human-made global warming (more significant than the entire global transport industry according to the 2006 United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation report ‘Livestock’s Long Shadow’), the LG’s advocate a shift away from an animal product based diet and towards locally produced, organic / permacultural production of plant-based foods. According to the UN and similar institutions, the global move towards a plant-based diet could result in as much as a 90% reduction in our food production footprint and would reduce our ecological footprint even more than giving up our cars for bicycles.

LG’s also advise us to use our consumer power to boycott environmentally irresponsible companies, to support mainstream environmental organisations, to participate in a ‘politics of demand’ via petitions and protests and to preference local or ‘eco-friendly’ industries whenever possible. In many ways, however, the LG movement is nothing more than a legitimation of the very same economic and political structures that got us into this mess in the first place and their proposals for change often amount to a belief in the idea that we can solve problems with the same kind of thinking that caused the problems – that we can solve carbon emission problems, for example, by allowing market trades of ‘pollution credits’.

Bright Green Environmentalism
Going one step further, BG’s ask how we produce. They tend to be enthusiastic about renewable energy, hybrid cars, nanotechnology and other ‘small footprint’ technologies. More often than not, this results in misplaced exuberance and the fetishisation of novelty for its own sake. In BG melting pots, the popular ‘TED Talks’, for instance, one encounters this regularly: machines that are connected to livestock in order to capture their methane emissions for use as clean energy is just one of the countless hare-brained schemes enthusiastically promoted by TED speakers.

While BG’s assert that technological innovation will allow us slow or even reverse the tide of ecological devastation, in practice this usually amounts to the kind of anachronistic belief in ‘the future’ that characterised such moments in our naively technotopic past as the 1939 World’s Fair or the Italian Futurist Movement (whose 1910 manifesto on the future is well worth reading as a symptomatology of terminal Enlightenment humanist faith in the myth of progress if nothing else). The aesthetics of this ‘retro-futurism’ are also core to BG’s: permaculture, for example, is not deemed as ‘sexy’ as massive vertical farming projects and natural building methods are pushed to the side as old fashioned, in favour of ’60s sci-fi style curved white buildings or mass-produced geodesic domes.

Dark Green Environmentalism
DG’s take both the LG and the BG positions one step further by questioning why consumerism has so fully permeated our lives and our values. In doing so they pose a challenge to two forms of irrational faith: the belief in the ability of ‘consumer’ activism to create market ‘solutions’ and the even more problematic belief in in the ability of ‘science’ to produce innovative solutions to any and all problems we encounter along the way.

DG’s believe that ecological devastation is being caused not just by what we buy and how it is made, but also by how we live and function as a society. They see the dominant political and economic ideology of globalised (post-)industrial capitalism as inherently flawed in its promotion of shallow and unsustainable relations with each other and the natural world, relations based on acquisitiveness, competition, mindless consumerism, homogeneity and reductionist atomization.

Not content to leave the analysis there, DG’s go on to state that the basis of all this is a misplaced emphasis on perpetual growth and progress at the expense of all else; the roots of this transcend market logic and also the development-centrism of a great deal of Leftist thought, and are in esssence simply a continuation of the myopic Industrial Revolution mindset that seeks to endlessly exploit the whole of nature for human benefit without recognising the unsustainability and arbitrariness of this approach.

Distinct from both LG’s and BG’s, DG’s encourage social activism and direct action – DG’s like philosopher and activist Dr Steven Best and writer and ecologist Derrick Jensen eloquently defend the use of any and all effective tactics in working towards ecological justice, including illegal activities like sabotaging logging operations, burning down Monsanto research laboratories or sinking whaling ships. While these are often described by mainstream media as  ‘extremist’ or ‘terroristic’ forms of action, Dr Best’s recent anthology ‘Igniting a Revolution: Voices in Defense of the Earth’ asks us to consider them in their full context, comparing the environmental struggle to historical justice movements and supplying countless historical examples of where revolutionary direct action proved effective once  reformist ‘light green’ measures had failed.

Even Darker Green Environmentalism
At the most extreme end of the DG spectrum is the ‘primitivist’ or ‘post-civ’ movement, the most recent outgrowth of which is the UK-based Dark Mountain Project, a group working towards the complete abolition of industrial society and the creation of grassroots alternatives. While there is penchant for the hyperbolic in their publications (their 2009 manifesto being a case in point), and while ‘primitivism’ is sometimes rightly seen as an escapist approach to the problems we face as a technologically enmeshed society, it is worth pausing for a moment to reflect on what exactly it is that we do want and what really does make us truly happy before we dismiss the idea of living more simply – or in more ‘primitive’ fashion – as absurd right off the bat.

After all, psychology tells us us that for all our flashy gadgets and cheap sweatshop clothes we’re no happier now than we were several decades ago; on the contrary, we’re becoming more anxious, more depressed, more self-absorbed and less capable of meaningful and fulfilling interpersonal relationships. And surely even those of us who are relatively ‘successful’ in our forced participation in the capitalist economy must resent the mundane and often meaningless slog of our five days of ‘immaterial labour’ a week, the long and congested daily commutes in our lonely cars, the mad rush to gorge ourselves on shiny but ultimately unsatisfying trinkets and the mediation of our interpersonal relations by impersonal mass communications technologies…

…instead we enjoy, almost every single one of us, leisurely time spent with family and friends, long walks through green expanse where we can marvel at the majesty and complexity of the natural world and simple time spent engaging our creative impulses – not as a means to some fiscal end but as an entirely satisfying ends in itself. These truly basic, really meaningful parts of human experience are not enabled by technological advancement – they are mediated, debased, virtualised, distanced and increasingly unequally apportioned by it, while the very social and material bases necessary for exploring and expanding on them are progressively destroyed.

Conclusion
So even though we have sent camera equipment to Mars and now know enough about the quantum world to build a simple calculator out of a glass of water, even if we have almost perfected the artificial eye and the bionic heart, and although we can now buy (if the unequal distribution of the world’s ‘resources’ is biased in our favour) high-definition 3D televisions, portable music players that hold a hundred thousand songs and touchscreen phones that recognise spoken commands, perhaps we have forgotten, in our mad rush towards some fictitious goal post, how to ask some very simple questions:

What is an individual human life and what is life together? What could living consist of? How do we define ourselves as a species and how do we measure our worth? Is this really the best it could be? Are we acting in the interests of ourselves and the planet? What is the value, intrinsic or otherwise, of the dwindling numbers of other species we share it with? What is it that drives all of us to act in such facile and self-destructive ways? Can this be changed? Will our strategies for change truly replace these failing systems, or will they instead merely serve to reproduce them?

Maybe, just maybe, if enough of us are brave enough to confront these kinds of questions honestly and with all of our being, without simply invoking our political or philosophical biases, the very shifts in living brought about in the pursuit of finding new answers will suffice to begin the long and uncertain process of change and move us a little closer towards saving not only ourselves but also, and perhaps just as importantly, all the other life on Earth that we have disempowered, artificially divided and claimed dominion over.

Until then, the old adage is surely true: our reach exceeds our grasp.

Biography
Aragorn Eloff is an independent anarchist researcher, a long-time animal rights activist and a passionate environmentalist. He is currently completing a documentary on the global history and ideas of anarchism and in his spare time distributes radical literature via the Missing Shelf.