View source for Political Economy of Attention, Mindfulness and Consumerism


'''* Book: The Political Economy of Attention, Mindfulness and Consumerism. Reclaiming the Mindful Commons. By Peter Doran. Routledge, 2017'''

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=Description=

Peter Doran:

"The power of capital is the power to target our attention, mould market-ready
identities, and reduce the public realm to an endless series of choices. This has
far-reaching implications for our psychological, physical and spiritual well-being,
and ultimately for our global ecology. In this consumer age, the underlying teachings
of Buddhist mindfulness offer more than individual well-being and
resilience. They also offer new sources of critical inquiry into our collective
condition, and may point, in time, to regulatory initiatives in the field of wellbeing.
This book draws together lively debates from the new economics of transition,
commons and well-being, consumerism, and the emerging role of mindfulness in
popular culture. Engaged Buddhist practices and teachings correspond closely to
insights in contemporary political philosophical investigations into the nature of
power, notably by Michel Foucault. The ‘attention economy’ can be understood
as a new arena of struggle in our age of neoliberal governmentality; as the forces
of enclosure – having colonized forests, land and the bodies of workers – are now
extended to the realm of our minds and subjectivity. This poses questions about
the recovery of the ‘mindful commons’: the practices we must cultivate to
reclaim our attention, time and lives from the forces of capitalization.

This is a valuable resource for students and scholars of environmental philosophy,
environmental psychology, environmental sociology, well-being and new
economics, political economy, environmental politics, the commons and law, as
well as Buddhist theory and philosophy."


=Contents=

Foreword: ‘a commons of the heart’ xi

1 Towards a ‘mindful commons’: the Anthropocene and the
attention revolution 1

2 The spirit of activism: non-violence as a way of life 26

3 The Cartesian legacy 41

4 Foucault, Zen and the art of challenging consumerism 49

5 Conclusions: attention deficit and ecological degradation
advance together


=Excerpts=

==Preface==

By David Bollier:

"The process by which capitalist investment seeks to reengineer and privatize
nature, government, social life and even genes and physical matter is at once
breathtakingly ambitious, subtle and insidious. The great contribution of Dr
Peter Doran’s A Political Economy of Attention, Mindfulness and Consumerism is to
show how this process is also aimed, with systemic zeal, at human consciousness
itself. Whether we realize it or not, our minds and culture are being colonized by
markets – through advertising and data-mining, entertainment media and social
networking. The hidden political and economic struggle of our times is focused
on shaping our inner lives.

This is a large, complicated story based on neoliberal capitalism’s impact on
everyday life: frantic work schedules, declining wages, wealth inequality, and
austerity politics, all of which have led to a degradation of public services, social
amenities and neighbourliness. It turns out that consumerism and market
growth, diligently supported by the state, are not in fact ‘maximizing utility,’ as
economists would have it. They are breeding personal despair, precarity, alienation
and social dysfunction.

The good news is that people are discovering paths of escape from the capitalist
phantasmagoria. More: They are creating new zones of self-organized
commoning that meet needs and produce things in more socially constructive
ways, independent of the state and market.

This trend can be seen in the growing interest in ‘care of the self’ and mindfulness,
and in the surge in civic engagement and social mutualism. A robust and
expanding digital culture, especially among the younger generation, is discovering
the virtues of social collaboration. People are waking up to the huge costs and
limitations of the ‘free market’ system – and convivial, life-enhancing dimensions
of open-source, commons-based approaches.

A neglected problem, however, is how to build new enabling structures of law
and governance to protect such spacious ideals of human life from marketization.
One hopeful sign are the dozens of one-off ‘legal hacks’ that attempt to carve out
protected zones for commoning, such as Creative Commons licenses to enable
legal sharing, multi-stakeholdler co-operatives for social services, and land trusts
to protect the interests of future generations.

Important as these innovations are, what we really need are systemic legal
strategies for moving beyond homo economicus. Law and policy need to honour
the ‘nested I,’ in which the individual is seen as integrated within larger ecological
and social systems. In Doran’s words, the ‘symbolic architecture of social
power’ must change so that we can shift from a world based on transactions to
one based on relationships. In effect, we must reinvent the political economy of
attention.

The mindfulness revolution offers great hope for imagining new ways of being
and knowing, as this book so beautifully explains. But it also remains clear-eyed
about the dangers of ‘McMindfulness,’ the mainstream effort to neutralize the
emancipatory potential of reintegrating mind, body and ecology. In this sense,
Peter Doran opens up new vistas of transformation."


==Towards a mindful commons==

Peter Doran:

"Activist and academic champions of the
commons ... have begun to respond to neoliberal capitalism and consumerism
with a series of critical counter-practices, piloting a radical alternative to the
prevailing hyper-individualist and consumerist ethos that recycles ‘biological
necessity into commercial capital’ (Bauman 2010: 67). 


A commons has a number
of important characteristics:

• It is a social (sometimes legal) system with some self-organizing capacity and
a commitment to preserving and sharing a local resource and working
together with shared values and identity.

• Access to the protected resource is organized on an inclusive and equitable
basis.

• A commons is often identified with the particular resource that it has
evolved to safeguard, use and preserve. In fact, a commons is always morethan-a-resource.
It is a resource plus a defined community and the protocols,
values and norms devised by the community to manage its resources.

• Finally, there is no commons without commoning or the practices that
embody the social practices and norms for managing a resource for collective
benefit.

As Ugo Mattei, one of the premiere theorists of the law of the commons, explains:

- phenomenological understanding of the commons forces us to move beyond
the reductionist opposition of ‘subject–object,’ which produces the
commodification of both. It helps us understand that, unlike private and
public goods, commons are not commodities and cannot be reduced to the
language of ownership … It would be reductive to say that we have a
common good. We should rather see to what extent we are the commons.
(Mattei 2012: 5)

Silke Helfrich (2012) has identified a number of core beliefs that seem to be
intrinsic to the practice of commoning and the organization of the commons,
including: for rivalrous resources there is enough for all through sharing; while
for non-rivalrous resources, there is abundance; humans are primarily cooperative;
knowledge is produced through peer-to-peer networking or collaboration;
and the vision of society foregrounds a conviction that one’s personal unfolding
is a condition for the development of others.

A feature of this contemporary commoning movement is the shift from a view
of the commons as a ‘thing’ or even as a set of arrangements to a phenomenological
emphasis on the active promotion of commoning as a way of being, doing
and seeing the world (Bollier 2014). Commoning has been described (Weber
2013: 44) as an attempt to redefine our very understanding of ‘the economy’, to
challenge a dominant understanding that valorizes rationality over subjectivity,
material wealth over human fulfilment, and the system’s abstract necessities
(growth, capital accumulation) over human needs.

Commoning shatters these dualisms and reconfigures the role of participants
so that we are not simply reduced to the roles of producers or consumers but
come to be regarded as participants in a physical and meaningful exchange with
multiple material, social and sense-making needs. Commoners realize that their
household needs and livelihoods are entangled with the specific place and habitat
where they live, and with the earth as a living entity. The recovery of the
commons is a collective act of restorative memory and remembering (Bollier
2014), practice, and a rendering visible of new possibilities for economic and
legal forms in the face of a failed attempt by champions of capitalist power to
impose a false arrest on the historical evolution of economic ideas: to revive and
re-embed slow practices in an ethos that is local or situated, entangled in relationships
that are human and non-human, and that command an ethics of care,
reciprocity and interbeing (Weber 2013).

Rowe describes the commons as the ‘hidden economy, everywhere present but
rarely noticed. It provides the basic support systems of life – both ecological and
social’ (Rowe 2001a). He notes that the ‘destruction of the commons has been
the leitmotif in much that passes for “development”. It is the threat that
connects many of the problems that beset the world’, from pollution of the water
and sky, to the breakdown of community, the toxic entertainment industry, and
attempts to engineer and patent the genetic substrate of life itself. Bresnihan
(2015) sums up one perspective of the commons, one that refuses to fix the idea
to that of a ‘resource’, for the commons is not merely land or knowledge but the
way these, and more, are combined, used and cared for by and through a collective
that is not only human but also non-human.

Commoning, then, denotes the continuous making and remaking of the
commons through shared practice. Bresnihan (ibid.: 4) adds that at the heart of
this relational, situated interdependence of humans and non-humans is not an
impoverished world of ‘niggardly nature’, nor an infinitely malleable world of
‘techno-culture’, but a more-than-human commons that navigates between limits
and possibilities as they arise."


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