I think I should start with a personal story. This is autoethnography, right?

So my first exposure to communal living was in college. Upon arrival, I very quickly got involved with a collective house called Crafts house. Living there had a huge impact on me and I still return there from time to time doing recruiting work for the FEC. After I had lived there for a few years, I began to put words to a sensation that I was having when I entered the house. The sensation was that I was entering into a larger creature, and becoming it in some way.

I started dumpster diving and thinking about death and rebirth. I was studying philosophy of biology and Isaac Newton’s alchemy. I got really into Jungian psychology – even entered Jungian psychotherapy. I wondered about what magic and souls were, if anything at all. I learned about endosymbiosis and the word superorganism.

When I graduated, I tried to start a collective house similar to Crafts House. I made a video about an idea I had called the The Gleaner’s Kitchen, and I said I was starting a Dumpster Restaurant. The video went viral, and I was totally unprepared. I raised some money, put it all into a summers rent of an apartment + basement. We began moving in, and then were evicted within a week. The landlord had googled me, and found out I was planning on starting a dumpster restaurant in his basement. I neglected to tell him this information before signing the sublease. oops.

I was pretty devastated by the whole affair. My overconfidence had gotten me and my friends evicted, and I had no plan for what to do next. One upside of the whole thing was that I had gotten a publishing offer to write a dumpster cookbook, so I spent the summer working on that, in a cramped, hastily rented apartment, feeling anxious and self-pitiful. When September came, I decided I wanted to live in community somewhere else, so I scheduled a visitor period at Twin Oaks.

When I got there I had an anxiety attack, mostly due to shock but partially because I had a cookbook to write, and no time to do so in community. So I left, and finished the cookbook at my mothers house.

I just went back to read the introduction to the book now, and much of it made me cringe. But still I suggest you read it here, I’ve attached a PDF. It’s not long.

One thing that I’m particularly embarrassed by in that intro is how I insisted on using the word We when I was talking about how *I personally felt about Crafts House, or The Gleaners Kitchen. I spoke for the collective in ways I had no authority to – I still wanted very badly to feel fused to that community. There are a bunch of other clumsy parts of the text too, but I’m including it here because I see in it the beginnings autoethnographic documentation. It contains primitive versions of the themes that I’ve been asking questions about ever since.

Those questions lead me to study with Terry Deacon – I was trying to think about identity from an autopoietic perspective. Then they brought me to Binghamton, because David told me that I would be able to study intentional communities from an evolutionary perspective. As my relationship with the FEC has matured, it seems time to shift to asking these questions from an autoethnographic perspective.

I’m concerned with selfhood, and agency, and want to know how the kinds of things which some people call souls emerge from a world in which they were formerly not present. I want to know how those sorts of things persist over time, even as the systems in which they are instantiated in change radically.

I have unnecessarily speculative ideas about the patterns which relate genomes to policy documents, and the both of those to sacred texts. In my daily life I am practically concerned with how to build a functional institution. How do we make decisions? How do we relate to members and non members? How do we make money? How do we hold each other accountable? How do we heal after a conflict? How do we create a system which can outlive its members? I need real world answers to these questions in order to make a living. But behind it all I have a belief that the theoretical answers to my questions about the emergence of self will imply functional suggestions about the practical community building problems that I work on daily.

My current goal is to be able to describe how communities think. I want to be able to thickly describe semiotic patterns as they develop in a community. These patterns take many hours, or years, of thinking with the communities to be able to describe them properly. And an autoethnographic perspective is essential to observe them, because how can I better understand how a semiotic process is unfolding than by thinking it myself?

After going through several difficult experiences while living in the FEC, I’ve started to think that one effective way to trace the patterns of communal thinking is to explore conflict. Interpersonal conflict is a serious handicap for the communities movement. Communities fail frequently, for complex reasons, but one major factor is almost always interpersonal conflicts which escalate until they permanently damage the whole.

I’ve started to think about conflict from a semiotic perspective. If communities think, then conflict is Thought, Disturbed. Or, maybe another way to say it is that conflict represents an information disruption in the system; A pattern (or several) which needs to be shared by all parts of the network is blocked from being expressed in some nodes. The thinking task at hand is to make sure the thought patterns are replicated in all the nodes necessary for the community to remain healthy. How must these thoughts change and adapt to fit certain minds, and how must our minds adapt to fit the thoughts?

An important theme here is interpenetration, of the types that go by fancier than necessary names like autogenesis, symbopoeisis, endosymbiosis, and pratītyasamutpāda – names which recognize that in physical biological systems, self and other are blurred and put in tension with one another in strategic ways that emerge a whole.

This is of course the way that I would choose to describe it, and the way that I was thinking about it when I started dumpster diving when I was 19 and thinking about death and rebirth. I’m sure that few people I live with in community think about it this way. It might be a foolish way to think! But there are echoes elsewhere. Nearly all the FEC businesses are in food systems, and for good reason. Acorn runs an organic heirloom seed saving business. I think about the resonances with genomes frequently. I even made a video about it. At East Brook, we often talk about our goals of living “symbopoetically with nature” (or some other jargon) through the framework of holistic management . More simply, I think a lot of people choose to live in community in order to live a life which is less separate from non-human ecologies.

So I think the prompt you gave me was to think about what I’m doing in terms of intentional communities, autoethnography, and social ecology; To explore where the three intersect, and to explain why my method is required to meaningfully understand the overlap. And I think the answer to the prompt might sound like this:

If my goal is to understand something better about the emergence of selfhood, then a productive way to explore that could be to examine selfhood as it emerges and develops across multiple communal scales. I (and others at East Brook) view the creation of the community as a kind of birthing process (Sarah has used this metaphor several times). In this metaphor, as a higher order kind of agency emerges, the selves which constitute it are transformed. These transformations are particularly apparent in times of conflict, when the community is compelled to think extra carefully, and when collective thought becomes difficult. The result of this process, if it goes well, is a new type of symbiotic hybrid agency, consisting of all the different species of self which have evolved to live together, as well as new ones created in the exchange.

Damn, I really need to massage these ideas better so they sound less like woowoo hippy BS.

What do you think?