permaculture

[John Schinnerer <eco_living@yahoo.com>]

Aloha,

> This is the stuff I've never been able to grasp. I've hacked my way,
> a little, through the thickets of Foucault and Derrida and some
others
> of the language Left, and I've never gotten much out of it 
> ... mostly just threw up my hands at what looks like utter
> nonsense written by bright men who live only in their heads. 

I think you have sussed them out pretty accurately, Toby.  I can grok
what they're on about, but only because I came to it by an experiential
path rather than a head-trippin' path, before I'd ever heard of them
(them being the "language left" philosophers). 

Suggestions for delving into living in languaging experientially -
including (naturally! :-) much about living systems, so good PC
learning in any case:

Read Gregory Bateson ("Steps to an Ecology of Mind," "Mind and Nature,"
"A Sacred Unity;" start with "Mind and Nature" as more accessible) and
Martin Buber ("I and Thou," "Encounter On a Narrow Ridge," the latter a
biography), maybe throw in a little Chogyam Trungpa ("Dharma Art")

Peruse them with intent to understand how they understand and explain
(rather than with intent to agree/disagree, advocate/defend, make
arguments, etc.).  That is, tease yourself into their manner of
explaining (their shoes) and look at it from the inside out.  That's
really a crux.

Do the same with Humberto Maturana, who takes a rather different
approach with the very languaging he uses, but is also furthering the
work of Bateson et al.  He is originally a neurobiologist, and is all
about living systems.  Difficult to find in print; I have several
papers that are conference papers and/or unpublished essays.  The
English translation of "Tree of Knowledge" is not recommended.  Some
papers are available online - start with "Ontology of Observing":

http://www.inteco.cl/biology/

...and there's a volume of essays in the works but getting a publisher
has been problematic, apparently.

None of the above is "easy" reading.  It's all well worth the effort. 
My take is that at some level "making it accessible" becomes "dumb it
down enough to sell well" and essential deeper understandings are lost
from the material.  An example would be Capra's book, "Web of Life" or
something like that.  Some say it makes systems and chaos and
cybernetics and so on "accessible" and some say it's so "accessible"
that it's ineffective or worse.

Experientiality is aided by mentoring and group interaction; for the
more ambitious, take Dr. Rodney Donaldson's series of courses, which
start with Bateson and Maturana, here in Seattle at his Crazy Tiger
Institute:

http://www.crazytigerinstitute.com/index.htm

If these sound cerebral, trust me, they're not!  Rodney always gets
mis-taken as very cerebral by those who really are very cerebral and
think they're not... 

Postscript - I have read a good handful of chapters from Kevin Kelly's
book online.  So far he seems to do a fair job of re-presenting aspects
of systems theory, genesis and development of cybernetics, holistic
approaches, networks, etc. etc., though rather freewheeling as to loose
ends and conclusions reached by prodigious leaps (hmmm, why do I
suddenly think "Designer's Manual? ;-).  At the same time he postulates
his neo-biological future, he seems unable to release a certain strong
infatuation with mostly high-technology incarnations of said future, in
a mode familiar to me from working in high-tech - the assumption that
since "we" have all this technology the whole rest of the world's
population must too, and if they don't it's just a matter of (a brief)
time and venture capital and government subsidies and globalization.

hi ho,

=====
John Schinnerer, MA
--------------------
- Eco-Living -
Cultural & Ecological Designing
Food - Shelter - Community
john@eco-living.net
http://eco-living.net

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