The Mutations Project

Welcome to the Mutations podcast. Why a blog? you ask.

I’m admittedly nostalgic for having a dedicated blog page to write from. These, I think, were a much bigger deal about a decade ago. There’s something to be said for finding eddies in the stream; a complement to the transient flux of social media.

Plus, often enough, so many of the notes I take for podcast episodes don’t make it into the actual audio. They’d go on too long. It’s a good excuse to write; thinking, talking, walking, writing through ideas is what I do.

So, yes, a blog.

With this year winding down, and the Mutations anthology coming out in 2020, I’m aiming to ramp up podcast production and get more authors and writers into the mix.

If you’re new to that project, Mutations: Art, Consciousness and the Anthropocene (Revelore Press 2020) is an anthology coming out next year featuring writers, scholars, and philosophers in the extended “consciousness culture” community. These include integral thinkers, “sense makers,” activists, metamodernists, ecologists, occultists and many others. The general idea is: we’re exploring what’s possible, what’s emerging—while helping each other to navigate what’s shutting down, coming to an end in our culture—and how the very act of coming together and entertaining these possibilities is what helps instantiate them.

Charles Eisenstein has popularized the idea that we’re living in a “time between stories.” The philosopher I often write about, and have spent the last decade or so studying, Jean Gebser (1905-1973), wrote something similar in 1949 when he talked about living in a “Janus-Faced” age, where the new is mingling with the old. Weird admixtures come about, making an already difficult time all the more confusing. Inquiring dialogue, and the tools of that dialogue, cultivated in the spirit of exploration and imaginative possibility, is so critically important in our time that I find no way of stating its significance with due gravity. Nonetheless, I must speak, and we must speak.

A number of online and offline communities have assembled over the last few decades exploring what this new culture could be. More recently, some of these important hubs describe what they do as “sensemaking,” exploring “Plan B,” or go by the “consciousness culture,” emergentsia, or the “integral movement.” I find myself at a crossroads with these regenerative communities, eager to listen and keen to bring them into dialogue with each other. Very often they already overlap with some brilliant people. The anthology I am contributing to and editing, Mutations, is a part of this hyper-textual conversation. So is this podcast, my publishing work at Integral Imprint, this blog, this community.

So, I hope you’ll join me in the coming months as I document this exploration, and contribute to it in my own capacity (Fragments of an Integral Futurism will be coming out in 2020, as well).

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On Mutations, from Revelore Press:

Mutations: Art, Consciousness, and the Anthropocene revives the need for imagining better worlds and using our imaginations as both a radical divinatory and political act. By putting words to the page through literary, political, and artistic creation, we generate instances, mutations, of these new worlds—realizations of the future latent in the present. This is an image of a counter-culture deeply engaged in the world, not defining itself by being against the present, but for the future. This anthology, then, builds a rhizomatic manifesto of consciousness culture—and how else could it be, but through a rhizome, a networked array?

Mutations invites a resurrection of the utopianism of the late 60s and the experimental institutions of the 70s, in our invocation to imagine a reality beyond capitalism—an occultism, a mysticism, for the Anthropocene. These emerging visions of the future promote transformations of worldview, remix past, present, and future mythologies, unleash new possibilities of aesthetics and philosophy. Contributors to this book find their home in liminality, engage in acts of “meta-cognition,” and are kin to the utopian project of spiritual and material emancipation. This book is a call for an approach to fashioning the future that is as mythopoetic as it is ecological, as mystical as it is political.

Read the full description here.