Diary of a Permaculturalist 9

Follow-up to Diary of a Permaculturalist 8 from George Ttoouli, Warwick Writing Programme

"Pluralistic humanism has run its course. What may have once encouraged individual growth and intellectual diversity for some components of culture is now producing a laissez-faire attitude that truncates the debate over cultural values through nonjudgmental or 'undecidability' postures...

"the most fundamental relationships are not resolvable through dialectical synthesis: humanity/nature, ignorance/knowledge, male/female, emotion/intellect, conscious/unconscious. And these paired terms are not even actually dichotomous or dyadic but only indicate idealized polarities within a multiplicitous field,such as that of planet, thought, sex/gender, perception, and mind... While human forces are always at work centralizing, quantifying, and coding phenomena, other human forces are always challenging and breaking up such reductions and constructions in order to sustain themselves."

(from Chapter One: Prolegomenon for an Ecofeminist Dialogics, in 'Literature, Nature, and Other' by Patrick D Murphy, pp3-4 (New York, 1995))

Yeah baby, dig that boundless discipline of life.

The supposed polarisation of these concepts actually creates hazards in the attempt to surmount the real problems attached to these issues. How can I be a man in the modern world? Or a woman? How does humanity learn to live with nature? Is humanity a part of nature? Mostly, these are redundant questions in the scheme of survival. We need to ask, "How do we survive?"

Similarly, story-telling, when presented through a dichotomy of narrative and anti-narrative, implies elements in opposition. As Murphy points out in his Prolegomenon, it's better to think of these concepts in relation to Bakhtinian notions of centripetal and centrifugal forces. There's the mainstream of creative praxis, filtered from experimentation and tradition. There are the centripetal forces, applying pressure to the conventions of narrative, 'anti-narrative', or so we call it, but in fact it's all part of the same set of 'story' or 'creative language'.

How does story survive in a permacultural fashion? By recycling. Oral traditions more acceptably contain updates, revisions, relativistic tellings according to the times as they are a-changing. The notion of an enduring text, one that doesn't change - the eternal, immortalising poem - is nonsense. Corruptions set in, new editions, no matter how small. Shakespeare's play texts are never 'definitive', and the stagings diversify and diversify.

Poets regularly revise poems after they've been published - in magazines, but also their own books - revisiting earlier work, from the perspective of the altered self. Some of these may change so drastically that only the echo of the former poem remains, while others might simply see a line, or a layout, shift. Ditto our relationships to concepts of nature and humanity, the interplay of elements in ecological systems.

Murphy points out, "Ecology as a discipline means, fundamentally, the study of the environment in its interanimating relationships, its change and conservation" (4). All the change management theory I've touched upon, however, is to do with managing brief periods of change between periods of stability. I know there are theories to do with a similar Bakhtinian sense of change management - gradual change, constant but non-seismic shifts to maintain a good balance between growth and stability.

That seems to be the right way to go solving the current issues of permaculture, from what I've been reading: learning to respond faster, to react to weather changes to produce positive outcomes. I think I need to do some more library digging. (Any recommendations welcome,of course.) So much reading I want to do, so little time.

George Ttoouli : 23 Feb 2009 09:00 |  Tags: Anti Narrative Change Management Ecofeminism Narrative Patrick D Murphy Permaculture |  Comments (2) |  Trackbacks (1) |  Report a problem