Metood and Friends – The Chronic Commons

Tjyvaparken, Kirseberg, Malmö 20/5 2020
Governmental waffle barbecue

Our Diagnostics and Recommendations

Here we are, palpably gathered in a space where speaking in tongues applies, in a situation where state recommendations have us rub shoulders with democratic reason, with it’s equally heavy and light bearings.

The current intensification of state unveils a portrait of society where big parts of the population are evidently out of democratic reach. We are up in arms, hard-facing the symptoms of democratic capitalism, the Swedish “choice orders everything” model.

The consequences of privatizing reforms in care and housing have tangibly stripped welfare of its bones, and now

It is mortal time.
We conjure up THE CHRONIC COMMONS.

CARE IS A BUZZWORD
Care as in Ego Care. Like “Self-care”?
No, it is EGO CARE.
Care, assuming a radical position in the art world, sailing up in synch with “soft value” economic terminology.
What lies in the statement
“I CARE,” “TO CARE?”

Another one: COMMONING
Could it imply stating the obvious, merely naming the continuous effort that has to be made for things to take place at all?
Who is launched as the caring subject when the “commons” is spun into the critical orbit?

Come again.
According to our situated ontology, sitting in a circle on a flag here, criticism and care are each others’ prerequisites.
Voicing criticism is a matter of being situated, present, minding the dead and addressing the living, co-mortal.
Anything else is waffle.

COMMONING KNOWLEDGE, COMMONING SENSE

MEL BAGGS, THE learned distributor of sense for the coming commons! Voicing a knowledge without defined interface between language, body, and the wild world. Resources and tools, rife in vibrant translation. To come in touch with another, perceived to be “out of touch” and losing oneself – that’s learning, as if under spell. Lose your bearings. Discharge aspirations to knowingness. It’s ignorance enblissed. Take your ignorance to be an invitation, not a trait. Hold forth and dare it.

There is no persona becoming profile becoming asset becoming swipeable, swappable game. Not here.

The game need not apply, it’s dead bread. Waffle.

Critical thinking is to think together with that which one is set to think about. Mind that! It’s care in practice.

Challenge your intuition (it’s bound to be conservative). Omnipotence is folly.
When critically engaging, be careful with defining things in ways that make you appear clearly cut (for) yourself. That’s engaging in narcissistic lockdown.
Loosen up. Trust is supposed to be a national trait here. Utilize it for what it’s worth. Laugh at and with yourself. The government might not save you this time, but saving was clearly not on the agenda anyway.
To DARE CARE, mind it’s not a position to claim and “be about.”
No experts in sight here.
Bend your exclamation marks into question marks. It is hard work, forging and carving. Nonprofit activity.
Work it.

Time to pull at the counterintuitive bootstraps!
This common compulsion to end in consensus, smoothing away any discomforts that antagonisms may have caused.
Think of the misguided petting you either have had to sit through or take part in.
Pull hard! Stop safeguarding narcissistic subjectivities that feel contested and singularly attacked. Refuse to reproduce ones that swallow up everything, at every turn upping and regenerating their game. Don’t apologize for having spoken. Pass up enforced “care”. It is a paternalistic concept, with motherly expectations – the beaten sexist family plot where acts to challenge power relations are swamped in familiar affirmations.
We recommend treating consensus like a literary olde mule – kick it (all old mules IRL are obviously to be doused in TLC)!

Consensus and neutrality, rationality and expertise.
That is the national comfort zone, with its reproductive eugenic baggage, rife in distribution, top down.
Never mind those “out of touch.”
Come out, SPELL IT

Think about the consciousness that the Metoo-movement brought forth – a rift for the historically feminized. How can we distribute the feeling for parallel exploitation, where the multitude of unreproductive commons permeates the efforts to justified betterment?
The hypervisible carnival for watching tongues, when and where will it take off?
Let’s marinate the grill itself, ignite and face down the politics granted ontological status.

It’s not subjects of choice that are subject to care here.
Forge alliances, out of sorts. Will a space for emergence, where unfamiliar attachments can flare up and take off.
Work hard for a “way of life.”
Reach out, be touched by the deemed “out of touchs.”
Touch back.

In high spirits and fluctuating states of sickness, summon the demiurge of deproduction.
Now here’s a breakthrough – beget the mother who speaks in tongues, the sole critic, fiercely dancing down the interface, turning the tides!

Birds chirping. Bone china clinking. Silent soap bubbles sparkling in the skies.
On our backs. Camera clicking. Alcogel causing red ink bloodshed. AHH
The protective gloves get swathed. Apple chomping, an odd one rotten. Allow for that. Spot out the rotten knowledge on the ground.

Onwards, beware.
To conflate care with value accumulation is to be sucked into the black hole of profit, collapsing into the den of economic lingua that eats it all. The same goes for narcissist logic. Swallowing all the air, circulating its criticisms and jerkily turning everything into its own advantage.
Simply turn away.
Downplay value inflation.
Here, endorse social distancing.
Slip up demands to provide and acknowledge.
Do not come in handy. Stay at a loss.

How do we frame effort and work? Can we upturn and shift the values attached to labour? The work that learning obliges us to take on is continuous and slow, certainly not CV material.
Have we been duped by some dumbbell version of machine logic: energy in here, out there? Major lockdown of potentia!
To counterpoise reproductive logic is painstaking work ad infinitum – it’s for the living, with the immaterialized ones imparted in our spines. Up the stakes, in communion.
For desire to emerge, become known to us, we’ve got to be strategic.
So. In order to void the chomping neoliberal self-proliferation machine that steadily pushes subjectivity as narcissism down the assembly line, we can

• Linger with the Paradox of voicing an ‘I’.
  Put this political fiction to play with hook, line and sinker! Beware the distinction between play and the game. Mind mortal time – discriminate! An odd trickster may pass, upturning tendencies to comfortable settlements. That’s alright.
  To ungender, the I and the we are in emergence. When they merge, tides will turn.

• Learn to imagine without an aspirational horizon.
  Aha! A simple shift of the formal imaginary stage-set could well scramble linear logic and undo contrived plots and attachments (they merely serve to consume anything vaguely reminiscent of desire anyway).
  The devotion and trust currently invested in the kurrrva (the curve in the state epidemiologist’s casual slur. Hear how it rolls like a dialectical dinosaur rising from the Scanian soil!). Utilize that? Or, scope out on the neodaddy of the nation and consider the 3D version – the pile, the heap? No claims to perfection and fulfillment there. In a state of incalculable figurative formation and collapse. Go, animate it!

When the game is flummoxed, we can double-cross the cramped compulsions to step it up. Blast the ontological conceptions adhering to care and work.
So, it seems we’re in for another big bash.
Invite the guardian, the interpreter, the translator, and “the out of touchs.”
A herd of sorts.
Wreak havoc in the interface. Get lost in the chronic work implied in generating a space for yet unmediated desire to pile up and fester. Collective spelling out loud!
It is mortal time.
Chronic commons, come hard and fast!