A Pedagogy of Death, Decay and Destruction
Introduction
I am interested in death, decay and destruction as generative forces and in collapse as a precursor to creativity. This is an essential part of re-learning ecological and cyclical thinking and an important thread in decolonising and un-learning a growth based, hyper clean, youth focused, death and dirt-phobic mindset.
These themes have been with me for a long time and I’m currently in a more active research phase, including solo and collaborative explorations, kindly funded by Lankelly Chase. I want to see how these themes might further inform practices of transitioning organisations, activism and group processes to something more rooted in ecological praxis, in the process of decoloniality and in climate justice. The context (as ever) is the social, ecological, cultural and climate breakdown at all levels of scale, including how it is distributed unevenly across the world. It’s situated in these questions:
- What will support a wider turning towards the realities of past, current and future collapse and destruction of ecosystems and social systems?
- What will enable us to work with generative forms of death, decay and destruction to change ongoing patterns of harm (in our organising and organisations)?
- What will nourish the soil of emergence so that new ways of being and doing that are rooted in decolonial, deep ecological and healing orientations can emerge?
“Dismantle , Disrupt, De colonise and then re- imagine what it’s supposed to look like…”
“How can we hospice a dying way of knowing/being and assist with the birth of something new, still fragile, undefined and potentially (but not necessarily) wiser with radical tenderness?”
– Vanessa Andreotti
These are inquiries I’ve been following in my own personal, creative and professional practice for many years. I’ve developed some practices and educational content(see below for references of where these have been shared already) which I wish to build upon and share more widely.
The work sits alongside my engagement within work such as Deep Adaptation, Hospicing Modernity and Postactivism ‘in practice’. It also intersects with the fields of regenerative agriculture, depth psychology, degrowth, radical feminism and creative disruption.
The project will explore the themes at levels of 1st, 2nd and 3rd person inquiry and work with an extended epistemology including ‘Artful ways of knowing’. There is a strong focus on education and capacity building amongst peers, projects and more widely.
Outputs to spread the learning more widely will include audio content from interviews, further developed practices for groups and organisations, writings and creative output. The collaborative aspect will also add to the emergent quality of the project.
More about the project
Arising from the industrial growth paradigm we are facing unprecedented social, psychological, ecological and climate breakdown, unevenly distributed across human populations and across species. Many are also bearing the past and ongoing traumatic effects of the intentional breaking down of ecological, cultural and racial health and dignity through generations of Empire and capitalism. While we do what we can to counter these harms, to transform human culture and to find new shapes of justice, it’s also clear that there will be more and worse degenerative and heart breaking collapse – on multiple levels – to come.
Attending to the grief, anger and other feelings we have about what is happening is an important part of collective resilience. Finding ways to act in solidarity with others bearing more of the burdens is an essential expression of reciprocity and healing justice.
At the same time, I’m interested in how our relationship – within modernity – to the natural cycles of death within life has got us into this mess in the first place and how the unlearning of this might help.
Within modernity, the idealised life hides away any signs of death, decay and destruction.
The falling apart of things: breakdown, collapse and disintegration are seen primarily as negative experiences. This might be at levels of personal, communal, societal, ecological, cultural. From the breakdown of a fixed idea of identity to the disintegration of a building, from the collapse of a dam to that of a power structure in an organisation (on any scale).
It shows up in things like: toilet and waste systems where all evidence of ‘the end product’ is hidden from the average citizen; in advertisements for cleaning and personal hygiene products (many of which kill off essential healthy bacteria too); in youthfulness as a constant aspiration (“oh, but you look so much younger than your age!” – suggesting that we must never get old). As a death-phobic culture, money is poured into ways to keep us alive as long as possible, regardless of quality of life. Elderly people are hidden from view and at the point of death, relatives rarely see and tend to their loved ones’ dead bodies.
If things fall apart or collapse in our relationships, work, health, creative projects it’s seen as failure, shameful. We are rarely supported to grieve, nor given healthy tools to relate with any kind of breakdown as an opportunity for new opportunities and learning – for breakthrough.
Once these aspects of life can be revealed and integrated, I’m interested in how breakdown, collapse, falling apart can all act as generative forces. How seeing the essential role of these within natural systems and cycles can help us be open to what might we find in the cracks of decay in modernity, what might grow from the rubble after destruction of what has been known, and what can be tended to and nourished after death creates space for emergence.
“…In system terms, expectations are the programs or codes around which a system self-organises. In order to change, and let new responses or new life emerge, systems reorganise—the old codes break down. I like the term positive disintegration. We’ve done this countless times in our five billion years here. We have reorganised all the way along, by receiving and responding to feedback about what’s going on. Sometimes it can be pretty uncomfortable. Imagine when oxygen first came in, or when we were pushing around on our fins trying to find some water. We have to absolutely be open to feedback…”
– Joanna Macy
This work is tapping into the work of compost, termites and hurricanes, of elephant feet, beavers and fallen trees. It’s exploring the multiple forms of agency that live in ecosystems to see what we might have to unlearn or learn to allow new strategies and practices for collective transformation and justice.
Further questions in the inquiry include:
- Where could a different relationship with death, decay, destruction, disintegration be needed?
- What needs to collapse? Or where is their generative potential in the collapse that’s already happening / happened?
- What if we had a healthy relationship with grief and loss? What might be healed, enabled, possible?
- What if we had a healthy relationship with natural aggression? What might be healed, enabled, possible?
- How might the problem (living in a time of breakdown) also be the doorway to the solution?
How to engage
Recent events
I’ve recently run the two events below and some online “conversations at my kitchen table”.
Interviews
I am interviewing people about this work from maggot and vulture experts to cultural burn practitioners and post-activist thinkers.
If you’re interested to know more, or have ideas to add, please do get in touch!
Toni Spencer 