exposed to the light

At Home in Nature: Modern Homesteading and Spiritual Practice in America
by Rebecca Kneale Gould




This is a great book. It smells wonderful, has a beautiful cover, and inspired all sorts of excitement in me when I first came across it at the UVA library, in the new books section.



It is one of those books that I almost wish I hadn’t read. Not because it wasn’t well written or interesting, but because the visceral and emotional thrill I got when I first ran across it could never be fulfilled through the act of reading it, no matter how well written.



So, before I say anything about what this book is about, let me explicate the self-defining moment of discovery. A couple of years ago, while I was fasting, in about my fifth day of the fast, I read a couple of articles that led me to volunteer at the local International Committee, and to get a subscription to Mother Earth News. That’s one of the beauties of fasting, that it breaks the routine, just from the very fact that meals are no longer a part of the day. It leads me to do things that I wouldn’t ordinarily do without undue consideration, on a whim. And, since one of the beauties of writing is to bring seemingly unconnected things together, the point is that this book rekindled a part of myself I hadn’t been conscious of in a while, that back to the land reading is like pornography to me (whereas porn is like reading the evening news). This book, through the beauty of its cover, through the way it smelled, and the heft and feel of the pages, embodied the pleasures that I get imagining living off the grid in a semi-rural setting. And the fact that it mentioned spirituality in the subtitle brought up a geyser full of dopamine. I was almost jumping out of my skin in delight, and the double espresso I had just had, along with the wonderful visit with my good friend Nathan and improvising ideas didn’t hurt.



So, just to get it out of the way, the main gist of the book is that there is a cultural context in the modern homesteading movement, that the ideal of a return to nature goes hand in hand with modernity. What it offers spiritually in this context is a middle ground between traditional religion, and the modern tendency to emphasize the self as the focus of one’s spirituality. While traditional religion calls for obedience to the group and to tradition, creating the danger of groupthink, and modern spirituality focuses on the self, creating the danger of selfishness, the homesteading tradition allows one to move beyond both tradition and the focus on the self by emphasizing one’s relation to nature. Homesteading has been associated with a movement of “getting back to nature” and of remaking the self. No matter how culturally bound the idea of nature is, the homesteading ideal causes one to live in a different context than the self centered capitalist. Relying on the conveniences of modern technology that tend to privilege the comfort of the self masks the fact that our survival as both individuals and as a society depends on the quality of one’s relationship to nature. Homesteading, on the other hand, forces on to reckon with the fact.



I find all this stuff very appealing, mostly in a fantasy kind of way. I hardly think I have the passion for labor that it would take to live as a traditional homesteader. I do imagine that having a big garden and some alternative energy sources is a realistic approximation, though. And until then, I have the idea to get excited by. I just hope that when it comes time to actually make my move in that direction, that the thrill of anticipation is fulfilled. It’s just like Christmas morning, when the thrill before the gifts are actually opened seemed to always be followed by the letdown of the actually existing gifts. Kind of like discovering a beautiful book and then having to actually read it, only to wish that it was possible to sustain the thrill of discovery and anticipation without ruining it all by actually reading it.



Fredric Jameson has an interesting article that was published in the New Left Review last year, concerning Utopia. I usually find Jameson impossibly dense and complex, and therefore endlessly fascinating in a constantly receding horizon kind of way. I did manage to follow most of this article and what he says ties in to this whole issue of the pleasures of reading and the anticipation of knowledge. Basically, the utopian impulse has to, by its very nature, be unfulfillable. Only by being politically impossible can Utopian thinking become possible. If it were possible, it would be too focused on the practicalities of politics, and thusly, no Utopian at all. In this way Utopian thinking keeps the space open to alternatives, and when alternatives actually become possible, disappears. Here’s the quote that makes the main point that I took from the article.



I want to convey a situation in which political institutions seem both unchangeable and infinitely modifiable: no agency has appeared on the horizon that offers the slightest chance or hope of modifying the status quo, and yet in the mind—and perhaps for that very reason—all kinds of institutional variations and re-combinations seem thinkable.

As one approaches periods of genuine pre-revolutionary ferment, when the system really seems in the process of losing its legitimacy, when the ruling elite is palpably uncertain of itself and full of divisions and self-doubts, when popular demands grow louder and more confident, then what also happens is that those grievances and demands grow more precise in their insistence and urgency. We focus more sharply on very specific wrongs, the dysfunctioning of the system becomes far more tangibly visible at crucial points. But at such a moment the utopian imagination no longer has free play: political thinking and intelligence are trained on very sharply focused issues, they have concrete content, the situation claims us in all its historical uniqueness as a configuration; and the wide-ranging drifts and digressions of political speculation give way to practical programmes (even if the latter are hopelessly unrealizable and ‘utopian’ in the other, dismissive sense).

I’d like to think that the pleasures of reading come into play in the same way. When one reads for no practical reason, the pleasure of possibility takes the foreground. If one moves into a situation when one can actually apply what one reads, the pleasure moves to the background. So, as long as I’m strictly a homemaker, with the limitations of possibility that that entails, I’m gonna enjoy me some reading. After that, when the options actually become possible, who knows. You might never hear from me again.

Just for a lark, I’d like to end with a synopsis of the above mentioned article that I created using Word Autosummarize, a function I’ve only recently started using and have found to be surprisingly helpful. Not sure if this is a good example, but here goes: 5% of the text highlighted. A 15 page article transformed into one. The wonders never cease.



The POLITICS OF UTOPIA

The two uses do seem somehow to overlap, and imply that a politics which wishes to change the system radically will be designated as utopian—with the right-wing undertone that the system (now grasped as the free market) is part of human nature; that any attempt to change it will be accompanied by violence; and that efforts to maintain the changes (against human nature) will require dictatorship.

Banishing evil

Let us begin again, then, with the textual utopias themselves. If there have been not just one human nature but a whole series of them, this is because so-called human nature is historical: every society constructs its own. I would not call this a vicious circle, exactly; but it certainly reveals the space of the utopian leap, the gap between our empirical present and the utopian arrangements of this imaginary future.

The citizens of utopia are grasped as a statistical population; there are no individuals any longer, let alone any existential ‘lived experience’. Let’s now return to the distinction I have been making between the two utopian perspectives, that of the root of all evil and that of the political and social arrangements.

Genres of political will

What can be said is that such analysis helps to determine the particular relationship to the political as such, entertained not only by utopia as a text but by utopian thinking and impulses generally. It is a peculiar and a paradoxical relationship, as I have already hinted; utopia is either too political or not political enough.

Mental play

How should we then formulate the position of utopia with respect to the political? Those stretches of human history are for the most part passed in utterly non-utopian conditions, in which none of the images of the future or of radical difference peculiar to utopias ever reach the surface.

This explains much about the various debates and differences that have peopled the history of utopian thought. The weaker alternative, in our time at least, is the term standing in for nature, affirmed unacceptably as human nature in the free-market idiom. I want to conclude by looking at the fear of utopia, of the anxiety with which the utopian impulse confronts us. Is it not possible that the achievement of utopia will efface all previously existing utopian impulses? Something is to be said for the proposition that the fear of utopia is intimately linked with the fear of aphanisis, or loss of desire: the sexlessness of utopians is a constant in the anti-utopian tradition, as witness John Boorman’s well-known film Zardoz.

Cow Poop creates electricity!

AGRICULTURE / 270 cows generating electricity for farm / Methane digester also breaks down waste

Now that's what I call sustainable. There's always going to be shit available.

The United States Versus America

Here's an interesting idea: the big problem is that the United States of America is based on a deeply flawed document- The Constitution. I always thought that bad things happened when laws were unconstitutional. I guess the framers had it all wrong.

WorldChanging: Another World Is Here: The Transcommercial Enterprise

This is the article that I read after reading "From here to Economy" ,that made me feel more hopeful. It's long, but if nothing else, I just want to point out that the blog it's on is great and quite worth following.

Grist | Main Dish | From here to economy | 23 Apr 2004

This article debates whether Capitalism is reformable, or whether only a socialist economy can take the environment into account. My first reaction was to think the debate is pointless, that neither option is ever going to be attempted, that we're screwed.

But on further thought and some other readings, I have to admit that between the two options, I find the reformation of capitalism more hopeful and realistic, far fetched as that reformative hope might be.

Ribbons of Revenge

I went and saw "Hellboy" with my friend Nathan, and on the way home we had an argument about the "Christian" message that they snuck into it by having Hellboy's hand glow after it touched a cross. He was mad that they snuck it in there, I contended that the title of the movie itself, the very premise, was Christian, so he shouldn't have been surprised. This article explores a parallel idea, but takes it further. I think I won the argument. Nathan will probably think he did. He's wrong!

The following three articles are about oil and it's relationship to food production. They are associated with Food's Frontier, the book recently mentioned in the "what I'm reading section". See Link on the left sidebar.

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Bottom of the barrel


The world is running out of oil - so why do politicians refuse to talk about it?

The Oil We Eat

Article by Richard Manning that originally appeared in Harper's. A good reason to go hunting!

Atlantic Unbound | Interviews | 2004.04.01

An interview with Richard Manning, who wrote the book Food's Frontier, mentioned in my other blog, from the Atlantic Monthly.

AlterNet: TV on Steroids

Last night I watched a great flick, called "Russian Ark" It's the longest one shot movie ever made, about the Hermitage, an art museum in St. Petersburg Russia. It's also about the history of Russia. But I don't want to get into that too much right now. The reason I mention it is that there's a scene in there of a symphony playing. That got me to thinking of what type of society would come up with the idea of a symphony, and how that contrasts with the primary form of musical expression, that of the individual musical performer.

My good friend Nathan came by this morning for coffee, and I was telling him about that thought, which led to us talking about centralized media and the type of attention they attract, and all the defintions of what society is that creates, contrasted with cyber media, blogs in particular, where everyone explores their own interest, and how that diffuses the idea of what a society is into something more abstract.

So along comes this article from alternet, reminded me of all that.

Power, Subjectivity, Resistance - Three Works on Postmodern Anarchism


Reading about anarchy leaves an interesting taste in my mouth. I always end up hungry, dissapointed with the reality of power politics. This review was more satisfying than usual, as it critiques traditional ideas of anarchy from a post-modernist perspective. As a Buddhist, I was particularly intrigued by the fact that they question the reality of "the subject", the "I" in other words. Transcending the self is a key to liberation and the end of suffering. I'm interested to see if I come across other links between anarchist theory and Buddhism. Here are some quotes from the article, you can read the whole thing if you follow the link--

"For Foucault, “power creates its own resistance.” My “buying a book” becomes an act of rebellion. It isn’t illegal to buy a book, the form of power that is being exercised is not the power of law or suppression in a traditional sense, what is being exercised is the power of the norm. The norm sets both what is to be internalized—not doing anything that could be interpreted as “wrong”—and, more importantly, constitutes what is transgressive: buying a book on anarchism. It is observation itself that creates, in the subject, something to hide. The previously innocuous activities of daily life become split so that many practices become transgressive. T.I.A. will create its own resistance; it will create a new underground. It will foster the creation of fake identities. As activists are cut off from social movements and forced underground and the public space for social change is closed off, T.I.A. will create terrorists as transgressive subjects. To choose either horn of the dilemma is not to escape the play of power. Rather, transgression reinscribes the power of the norm. Transgression is reactive; the question for anarchists is how to become proactive?"

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"As an abstract notion, “the subject” is a product of an Enlightenment discursive practice and, as such, cannot serve as an anarchistic ground for resistance or as an object of liberation."

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"How can Newman take this view of power as domination? It is only from the perspective of an extreme individualism that all forms of power, especially social power, can be seen as equally oppressive—oppressive of the sacred individual.(15) Newman does well to dust off the individualist anarchist Max Stirner and bring him to the table to join in the discussion. Stirner provides Newman with a thoroughgoing critique of Enlightenment thinking. Stirner critiqued Enlightenment Humanism as a replacement of religious categories wherein “Man” has replaced “God.” For Stirner, this abstract fiction called Man oppresses and “mutilates” the individual. The abstract category of “Man” denies an individual’s uniqueness. For Stirner, there is no human essence, there is only at base a “nothingness.” It is from this nothingness, according to Stirner, that an individual can create his own identity.

The idea that an individual does not have an essence, that s/he is essentially nothing, is important for Newman because as he states: “The lack that Stirner finds at the base of identity will allow the individual to resist this modern subjectifying power.”(16) Newman fortifies this position by using Jacques Lacan and his concept of “lack.” For Lacan, the process of subjectification is never complete, there always is a gap between the individual and its representation as a subject.(17) It is this “empty space” that Newman thinks will provide a ground for resistance.(18)"

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"Based on the work of Deleuze, Call advocates a politics based on desire asserting that desire is inherently revolutionary.(20) However, I would agree with Newman that desire in Deleuze achieves a metaphysical quality operating functionally as a replacement to modernity’s essentialism. Instead of power repressing a benign individual essence, power in this conception is repressing an inherently revolutionary desire.(21) Moreover, I would argue along with Foucault that desire is also a social construction. There is nothing inherently liberatory about our desires. As products of our societies we are filled with conflicting desires, many of which are bound up in domination.(22) "

And what of the Buddhist notion that desire is the root of misery? It's almost the exact opposite of Deleuze's notion of Revolutionary Desire. Perhaps an examination of the types of desire possible, and how they correlate to both political and spiritual liberation is in order. Just asking.

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"On a societal level, Call puts forth an example of one proactive practice, one that revolves around the concept of the gift and its radical potential. In tracing the concept of the gift starting with Mauss, moving through Bataille, and ending in Baudrillard, Call raises the struggle over the sharing of information on the internet to a potentially revolutionary status—one that falls outside of the logic of capitalism. In paraphrasing Baudrillard, Call writes, “the symbolic violence of the gift without return is the only violence which has any chance against the omnipresent semiotic codes of political economy.”(25) In other words, the capitalist system is based upon the logic of commodity exchange; a gift without return—as a unilateral principle—cannot be accounted for within that logic and so disrupts it.

Call takes this concept in the direction of computer discussion boards where individuals give the gift of advice; however, Call’s insight can also be taken in a more literal way—the sharing of information including software, music, and text. In the capitalist system commodity exchange is the norm (theft and piracy are transgressive) and thus the gift without return (Open Source Software) is a proactive practice that escapes capitalism’s binary logic. The Open Source movement is an articulation of the strong anti-capitalist ethic in regard to the internet, summed up by the hacker credo: information is free and should be freely available. It’s easy to see the revolutionary potential of file sharing on the internet, not just in its own right, but additionally because of the logic that it introduces. When people engage in these alternate practices, they create a different power articulation. The practice of sharing information freely, without expectation of return, runs counter to capitalist practices. This is not to say that the internet will overthrow capitalism, but rather, the internet has opened up a space where non-capitalistic practices can be played out. Call demonstrates the value in trying to further these practices.(26)"

"Call’s notion of the potential of the gift without return can also be applied to the offline world as well where the practice of gift giving without compensation already happens in scattered, fragmented ways: soup kitchens, libraries, charity groups, non-governmental aid organizations, etc. What if these practices were networked so that one could get all of their goods and services from a gift-giving network? If a woman had a baby, she wouldn’t register at a store, she would put out a call to the network and receive everything she needed: clothes, diapers, a crib, shoes, babysitters. What if such a network grew to become the dominant mode of exchange in our society?"

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