Here we describe the aesthetic landscape - the landscape of affiliations and orientations, perceptions and intentions, and their radical transforming and mobilising.
This is a branch of Weft - Three landscapes of material existence
The possibility of satisfaction and direction in people’s lives arises from the capability to respond skilfully, moment-to-moment, **in-here**, in an ocean of emotional forces - **a plurality of in-heres**, both in here and out there - with a well-founded intention of achieving wellbeing and the end of suffering.
**Structures of feeling** are implicated, giving rise to intentions, affiliations, perceptions, expectations; etcetera. In general, these systems of affect and emotion, movements (lurchings)-toward and movements-away, are wild.
The challenge of curating, stewarding and appropriately enjoying **emotional commons** is perhaps the deepest of all: a challenge - paradoxical as it might seem - in both Deep/evolutionary time and eye-blink in-the-moment time . . both below and above commonplace thresholds of perception.
Time - on a number of levels - is of the essence, and clocks are ticking fast. >Key pattern §300 - **Deep Time** To be added
This landscape is highly fluid, labile, a constant flux of tides. The first nine-tenths of it (at least) are in the **preconscious** and the window for intelligent, skilful engagement in this stuff is small and takes an uncommon degree of cultivating. This landscape - and skill, vision and ability to **surf** and **navigate** in it - are pivotal for the activist. - First, because she needs to be very literate with **her own** perception and response in this landscape . . where her attention goes and how it comes out in intention and affiliation; how we are swept along by the tides of Others’ emotions (‘our buttons pushed’); the tribalising and Othering and wanting and disdaining. - And second, because **the heart-mind landscape of others** (the totality of ‘in-heres’ out there) is where actions pivot.
If practices - genres, institutions, formations - are to be durably re-made, activists must facilitate the re-making of, for example . . >. . the memes that folks get hooked on . . the appetites we indulge . . the Selfing and Othering we do in the making and sustaining of our formations. **The buttons we are prepared to push, when push comes to shove.**
The structures of feeling (sankhara) that are constituted in these always-continuing §3 processes are the basis of our activist formations (and those of our enemies), and need to be very self-consciously the basis of our §2 practices of formacion. They are the personal and collective **genres**, **stories**, **conceptualisations** and **skillsets** - the constitutive elements of the §2 cultural landscape - that are wired together, because they have repeatedly been fired together
The literacies of this landscape are hard to acquire and communicate, little taught, only occasionally theorised (in the §2 storytelling and conceptualising of sangha) and the wild commons of emotion are not easily domesticated at scale. Incompetence is always exploited, often maliciously cultivated. Since the inception of Fordism (consumerist capitalism) the malice has become an entire, foundational cultural and economic sector: Madison Avenue, the media . . the button-pushing industry.
The greatest activist challenge, in a world in which the largest material commons of wild Nature have never yet been intentionally commoned at scale, and are now collapsing, lies in this - the landscape of the wild **emotional** commons.
This schema summarises the main constructs involved in engaging the aesthetic landscape . .
- Dramatic personae - The material forces of production of perception and intention, affiliating and supremacy, moving impulsively towards, moving impulsively away. >Dramatic personae - §3 The aesthetic landscape To be added xxx
- The preconscious and lifelong processes that continuously form Self and Other (including skilful countervailing movements that can be cultivated). >Processes - §3 The aesthetic landscape To be added xxx This mapping is derived from the scheme of conditional origination, in the dhamma of buddhist traditions.
- Dominant, emergent and residual relations of aesthetic/affiliative production in the landscape of the **heart mind**. Four ‘limitless landscapes of the heart mind’ and their near- and far-enemies . . > including gut responses, knee jerks, immediate impulses, fight/flight/ freeze, violence, dominance of alpha animals, herd-following, addiction to memes, confusing what-I-feel with what-is-true, emotional lurching under the impact of stuff that presses your buttons, blocking out what is painful, yearning for the familiar-but-lost, addiction to disgust or disdain (including self-disgust and disdain). Etc, etc). >RoPs - §3 The aesthetic landscape To be added xxx This mapping is derved from the four brahmaviharas ('divine abodes') in the dhamma of buddhist traditions.