communities on the edge of the pre-invented world
by Ivan March
“Friendship is devolving from a relationship to a feeling — from something people share, to something each of us hugs privately to ourselves in the loneliness of our electronic caves, rearranging the tokens of connection like a lonely child playing with dolls. The same path was long ago trodden by community. What we have, instead of community, is, if we’re lucky, a ‘sense’ of community — the feeling without the structure; a private emotion, not a collective experience. And now friendship, which arose to its present importance as a replacement for community, is going the same way. We have ‘friends’, just as we belong to ‘communities’. Scanning my facebook page gives me, precisely, a ‘sense’ of connection. Not an actual connection, just a sense.”
– William Deresiewicz
A Sense of Unity?
“We create ourselves. The sequence is: suffering, insight, will, action, change.”¹
“A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living.”²
It’s no secret that utopian intentional communities often fail, and it’s quite the bummer for doe-eyed hippies and us cravers for a seriously different form of life than the one we’ve inherited. The world is rife with causes for division, disagreement, discord, and advancing in unity (while holding difference) is tremendously tricky. However, it seems that often it boils down to the incapacity of communities to evolve past good intentions. The juvenile communitarian stage is suffused with drive, passion, excitement, mojo, joint affinities (ie. nerdom) and an overarching alignment in their burning desire to escape from the dog-eat-dog crapitalist meatgrinder. But this drive needs maturation, the fine Gruyère takes time, otherwise we’re stuck with cinema nacho cheese that always somehow gives illusory promises of better taste than it actually ever delivers.
Human desire can often be led astray; how is this fiery drive to be guided by intention caged by consumerist accelerationism and reduced into scarcity, isolation, and individuated narratives. Even self-care, self-love, self-centred obsession is part of the McMindfulness machine, cheap knock-off self-improvement – ‘if you can’t love yourself how the hell you gonna love someone else?’ A partial truth, but a dangerously linear, reductive one. It insinuates that we can first sort out the self-love and then expand this emotional capacity to include others – rather than treat it like a consistent practice, a sisyphean struggle to accept oneself, while trying to love another.
Thoreau was writing almost two centuries ago that all around he witnessed, “masses of men leading lives of quiet desperation”³, today still, most people are crushed into servitude, the leftovers must find some solace in having the privilege to pursue alternatives.
‘Loneliness is almost cured when you open a book.’ Almost. You’re less lonely somehow but it doesn’t quite satisfy the urge to merge with another consciousness. You can be surrounded by people and still feel absolute aloneness, in fact, a crowd can amplify how alone one feels. Hugs, dancefloor kisses, mdma, undivided attention, all offerings and tonics in pursuit of connection, yet some taste hollow, dry, tainted with fleeting temporariness or ulterior motives.
The grass is always greener on the other side. Starting with private property, nuclear family, nationalisms, infiltrated by either envy or competition or suspicion of one’s neighbours. The harsh infrastructure of separation. Many of us are born into this simulation, yet we should never let someone who accumulates surplus value, sell us the myth of scarcity. Rainbow families, kibbutzim, ecovillages, communes, intentional ashrams and psy-lodges for altered state investigations, different configurations of retaliations against the supermarket binaries of the dominant culture. There’s no return to a pre-capitalist society. The only way out is through.
“As desiring creatures, we ourselves are that which disrupts organic equilibrium.”⁴ We named the era after ourselves, the Anthropocene. Human desire is a Pandora’s box which cannot be closed.
If Capitalism is allowed to maintain a monopoly on desire — and if only under Capitalism we can express ourselves, then the left has no chance. The future envisioned by much of the left often resembles the past: the grey, drab brutalist buildings of the Soviet Union. Every Political Economy Is Libidinal. It is about the production, regulation, and dispersion of libidinal energy, of desire.⁵ It is inseparable from us. What we need, more than theorising post-capitalism, is imagining & practicing post-capitalism..
If only there was a space that allowed for sizeable experiments in worldbuilding, an ephemeral community, re-gathering on an annual basis (for the in-the-flesh attunement) building up a little village which centers creativity and imagination, and is dedicated to exploration of inner frontiers and metaphysical tests of selfhood and tribe..
..enter the festival.
Love and Light and Narcissism and Paranoid Androids
“No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots are in hell.”⁶
As any raver or mythologist will tell you, the underground is where we encounter our shadow, our shame, our pain. Even though bards inform us that the cracks are where the light gets in, the self-help gurus and back-alley shrinks offer superficial sanitisation solutions, in stark contrast to the ecstatic rites of old that honoured our dark side as much as the light. Too much light is blinding, and it teaches us little about confronting the fallen angels of our nature, the aching, starved, terrified ones. A couple of thousand years ago, those inclined to ‘sinful’, orgiastic expressions of the inner beast worshiped Bacchus. Bacchus was a party deity, representing both the wild and untamed aspects of nature. A shapeshifter, an icon of pleasure and catalyser of madness, also understood as loss of self.
Paranoia. When the mind is beside itself. It is an instinctive thought process characterized by anxiety, suspicion, or fear, often to the point of delusion, irrationality, or intrusive thoughts. Cleanly archived in the DSM-IV-TR, and treated with antipsychotics.
Counterculturalist, Erik Davis, flips paranoia from a clinical pathology into an opportunity for self-reflection, via ‘the practice of paranoia’, or staying with “the feelings of the initial vertigo and noticing the narratives that might arise – which may, after all, be true or at least somewhat useful – do distrust the world, as you must, but distrust your thoughts about the world as well.”
Davis mentions Lacanian analysis, which functions as a way of inducing controlled paranoia, attempting to be a separate self that is divided and vulnerable.
Same goes for love. The vulnerability of true intimacy is a million times hotter than twisting your body to try being a ‘good object’ for society. The vulnerability of true intimacy is a million times hotter than being chosen by someone whose body you consider domesticated enough to validate your own status as a ‘good object’.
And this becomes a thrilling opportunity for contemporary communities to level up into tensional status, finding collectively ways to hold our weirdest shadows, to learn to coregulate our polyvagal nervous systems. To discover limbic revision — “the power to remodel the emotional parts of the people we love”, and to have our own emotional pathways remodeled by the people who love us. The mind narrates what the nervous system already knows.⁷ But it is in a trusting community that we have the chance to repattern the synaptic bruises from childhood. When the world is in deep political division and death tolls climb, can we still encounter one another as people first beyond political agent or ethnic object tags?
Anarchoqueers might wanna try fucking the pain away, but woke manifestors wishing the pain away are delusional at best, while the toxic positivity approach constricts the journey from uniting in intention to staying united in tension.
So what then are the tethers of the modern family? Especially outside the limiting primitivo-fictional bonds of bloodlines.
Fragmentation/DeFragmentation
‘It is in our collective behaviour that we are most mysterious.’
There is of course the more cynical take that “democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance” and thus we are stuck in a Westworld automaton loop, rigged politics, apathy, corruption, and starved imaginations that conform to their pre-invented prisons.
Western canon thinkers proclaimed that “no one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life” as well as that “only as we are in communion with ourselves can we find community with others”.. failing to capture the option that you can find connection to self through being in community.
Transformative community means unlearning the colonial inclination to have ‘power over’, and striving for ‘power with’.⁸ Power with the team, the familia, the tribe, the interdependence net, built on trial and error, copious exposure to each other, and whatever system of navigation that is employed, whether it’s sociocracy or anarcho-assemblies or any attempt at fairer, sharer ways of taking decisions.
Communication is queen. Prentis Hempill reminds us that “boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously”, as Abbas Beydoun suggests that “the distance between two bodies is; itself a body too.”
Therefore a third path is needed, beyond the apollonian/dionysian divide, beyond the classical thinking versus romantic thinking, past leftness and rightness, or rather a third range of paths.. and these paths lead to a third body, a macroorganism of well attuned, limbically resilient tribefolk.
Friends, Chosen Family, Community, Kin, this is felt in the bone marrow. The gut. Vast trust. The kind of trust that allows you to plunge yourself into the abyss, knowing that it will be a feather bed.
Communitas Imperfecta
McKenna warned us of the real four horsemen of the apocalypse, ‘monotheism, monoculture, monogamy and monotony’. Already these horsemen seem to stem from industrialisation, and worshiping the gods of safety, predictability and comfort. McKenna eggs us on “to return to nature. Observe. Open your eyes. Get smart. Culture is not your friend. Religion is not your friend. The values of these cultures are fatal. And if we don’t wrench the direction of human society into an entirely new way of doing things, the clock is ticking. Nature is unforgiving. Intelligence is a grand experiment. But if it does not serve novelty and diversity and the production of love and community and true caring, who needs it?”
A disorienting zeitgeist is haunting the present, New Individualism⁹, built on ‘the reinvention craze’, from therapy culture to managerial optimisation, this narrative of endless hunger for instant change and obsessive remaking of self. Eva Illouz in ‘The End of Love’¹⁰ portrays a somewhat dystopian picture of contemporary romance, where the absence of ritual and traditional obligation has led to the breakdown of passion and loving commitment. She traces logics of consumerism in courtship practices and reveals their bleak outcome: the ‘end of love’ itself. The neoliberal individual is self-enterprising and rejects any obstacle to personal flourishing. The most burdensome obstacle? What one might perceive as inevitably risky, relationships that hold one back.
Therefore can the response to new individualism be new tribalism, a bless-the-mess, emergent, style of collective culture, that might be birthed within idealism, innocence and imaginaries that are still unmutilated, carried by the collective body of a group of friends or a crew of countercultural festival acid communist neurodivergents?
Emergent Neotribalism
Tribe. The English word comes straight from Latin. A contested anthropological term hierarchically larger than a clan, but smaller than a chiefdom. Tribes in general are characterized by fluid boundaries, heterogeneity and dynamism, and are not connected to a major religion. The term has been beaten to death by ayahuasca bros and the love and light burners, but it could use some reclaiming. The tribe, ‘a unit of sociopolitical organization consisting of a number of families, who share common culture and among whom leadership is typically neither formalized nor permanent’.¹¹ The festival tribe does have a lineage, many artistic convergences, chemical sacraments, and an attempt at liberation from the stranglehold of normcore pressures.
Drawing an analogy to music — because it shares a fundamental neuropsychological mechanism with emotion — psychiatrists examined the composition of feeling out of neural sync, pointing to the difference and entanglement between emotion and mood:
“Emotions possess the evanescence of a musical note. When a pianist strikes a key, a hammer collides with the matching string inside his instrument and sets it to vibrating at its characteristic frequency. As amplitude of vibration declines, the sound falls off and dies away. Emotions operate in an analogous way: an event touches a responsive key, an internal feeling-tone is sounded, and it soon dwindles into silence. Rising activity in the emotion circuits produces not sound, but (among other things) a facial expression. When the neural excitation exceeds a shadowy threshold of awareness, what emerges is a feeling — the conscious experience of emotional activation. As neural activity diminishes, feeling intensity decreases, but some residual activity persists in those circuits after a feeling is no longer perceptible. Like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, an emotion appears suddenly in the drama of our lives to nudge the players in the proper direction, and then dissolves into nothingness, leaving behind a vague impression of its former presence.”¹²
Precisely like listening to a great record.
Intention to hold Tension
For one consciousness to understand another — to understand what it is like to be another — might be the supreme challenge of communication and coexistence, because we each move through life half-obscured even to ourselves.
“One person’s ‘barbarian’ is another person’s ‘just doing what everybody else is doing’.” ¹³ Even though being well adjusted to a profoundly sick society is no sign of health, for the social outcasts and misfits there is no home to go back to. Attempting to find belonging, bonding and believing amongst others you vibe with.
While a religion is merely a cult with mainstream recognition and membership, the thread between cult, rave as worship, tensional community and festival pilgrim is evident. What tapestry does this thread weave?
foto: anna leevia
Perhaps it depicts woven tales of the groovement. A nondirectional movement. A practice in harmonic and disharmonic equilibrium of vibing. A communitarian oscillation. Collective effervescence unraveling. A propulsive force that doesn’t demand certainty rather an openness to reemergence from failure. A group’s series of rêvelations. An extended exercise in trust. A pendulum swinging between static and dynamic values. Consistent course-correcting and metamorphosing. Rave as ritual, as escape, as imagination food, as encounter with sweat, blood, guts and the cosmic joke. Perhaps a psychotropic sacrament is involved, perhaps not; perhaps there is an annual pilgrimage, a site of continuous encounters with the sacred and the profane, alongside close encounters with liminality.
‘Mors certa, vita incerta.’
We the dying yearn for our stories to matter but far beyond that we yearn to be seen and understood, for our pain to matter, to grow past our scars, and find safety and joy and thrills amid our kindred, fellow travelers. The ways in which we choose to cultivate entanglement, enmeshment, interdependence will also depend on the tensions we can hold and the hardships we can endure. We rightly suspect that our most intimate desires and self-images are actually sneaky intrusions from outside. Adulting is heavy on discerning what’s yours and what isn’t. Values, fears, desires. In the words of Rimbaud, “I is an Other.” Therefore it is in the other, often at a rave, that we encounter ourselves.
References
1. Phillips, Adam, (2021) ‘On Wanting To Change’
2. Woolf, Virginia, (1882-1941) ‘The Death of the Moth : and other essays’
3. Thoreau, H. D. (1854) ‘Walden’
4. Deleuze & Guattari (1972) ‘Anti-Oedipus’
5. Jean-Francois Lyotard (1993) ‘Libidinal Economy’, trans. l. H. Grant
6. Jung, C (1951) ‘Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self’
7. Deb Dana (2018) ‘The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy: Engaging the Rhythm of Regulation’
8. bell hooks (2013) ‘Changing Perspectives on Power’
9. Elliott, A (2013) ‘The Theory of New Individualism’
10. Illouz, Eva (2019) ‘The End of Love’
11. Morton H. Fried (1972) ‘The Notion of Tribe’
12. Lewis T, Amini F, and Lannon R (2001) ‘A General Theory of Love’
13. Sontag, Susan (2003) ‘Regarding the Pain of Others’