Hello, my name is Ariane Beaudin.
I am an anticapitalist writer and eternal generalist.
Welcome to Ravirer, my digital garden.
But what is a digital garden? Joel Hooks describes it as
a metaphor for thinking about writing and creating that focuses less on the resulting “showpiece” and more on the process, care, and craft it takes to get there.
If you want to know more about me or what I’m doing, you can jump to the /about page or the /now page. I also write poetry & propaganda.
19 Sep 2021
I felt compelled today the regroup the nice media I’ve consumed about the topic of herbalism and gardening from some sort of decolonial lens. It’s a logical continuation of the feelings I have found in myself while writing my last post in the mouth of the lion, i.e. that I am deeply sensitive and interested in gardening and interacting with plants as a way to nurture the collective dimension of human life.
So here’s some great podcast I’ve listened to these days :
- Restorative Agriculture : Gardening, Homesteading, & Permaculture by Revolutionary Left Radio, emphasis on gardening/permaculture as a way to be resilient and useful for our communities in the incertain times to come + critique of the whiteness in the permaculture world, needing to reindigezine our practice
- Ann Armbrecht: Healing with herbalism and its deeper relational values by Green Dreamer , covers herbalism at large, but talks more specifically about the commodification of plants, also includes an invitation to rethink our relation to healing and medecine in general, emphasis put on connecting with our local plants (Green Dreamer podcast is wholesome in general, probably my fav podcast at the moment)
- To follow up with the Rev Left Radio episode, the guest of the already mentioned episode, Sole has his own podcast Propaganda by the Seed which I haven’t tried yet, but I am sure I will enjoy it because hey when comrades/revolutionaries meet plants, I always enjoy it
- rise up! good witch podcast is also a good one I’ve been enjoying this last year, it is more on the spiritual/esoteric side, but still very militant, the host likes to highlight people’s plant origin story (that is, to cover how they came to herbalism) and it’s a very interesting way to approach herbalism in my opinion
Now time to turn to the interesting books :
- I’ve added Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer to my ereader after the already mentioned Rev left podcast episode, which is a book about the indigineous ways of taking care of the land to what I’ve understand, and I’m very excited to start it. Sole said it adds to the poetic dimension of gardening and this book made him cry a lot. I also downloaded Gaia’s Garden following his recommendations, which is apparently a classic of permaculture litterature, but I feel like I will enjoy it less because it seems like a practical guide for people who owns landLa ré
- The One-Straw Revolution: An Introduction to Natural Farming by Masanobu Fukuoka. This is a book I’ve enjoyed a few years ago. It’s, in some way, a japanese permaculture book but with a mix of anarchism and buddhism and it really resonated with me. I need to re-reagood it some day.
- Radical Remedies by Brittany Ducham is a book about using herbalism for self-care and self-healing but it looks like uber wholesome. It’s like a kitchen witchcraft guidebook. It oftens cross my instagram feed and I always say to myself that I need to gift it to me.
Meanwhile, I also put my name in the waiting list for this online AEC en production maraîchère biologique of the Cégep de de Victoriaville (just in prevision for the next existential crisis you know). I’m already daydreaming of doing my intership at the farm of Santropol Roulant hahaha
Hopefully, I’ll update this post with time!
10 Sep 2021
Lately, I’ve been experiencing a rollercoaster of emotions as I follow up with my decision to run for city counselor as an independant candidate. I’m so glad that I have found a buddhist mantra to hold unto while I was listening to the Green Dreamer podcast :
Illumination doesn’t happen in a cave, it happens in the mouth of a lion.
I wouldn’t say I feel near illumination whatsoever, but I do feel like I am in the mouth of a lion right now. I need to actively find ways to keep going and not let myself spiral in anxiety, self-doubts and scarcity mindset. My old drinking habits are also coming into play with these mental health struggles. But what I found helps me the most to go through the days is my spiritual practice and also, the already mentionned Green Dreamer’s podcast.
There has been a few very memorable episodes that made me felt like I should put them down somewhere, write something about it, well, to digital garden with. So here I am back to do just that and I took the opportunity to also revisit old posts of mine and my piece Witchcraft Is Social Change made a very good effect on me. I forgot I wrote that honestly. In the same line of thought, I received a mail yesterday from Etsy, telling that somebody put my product in their cart. Product from an Etsy shop I had somewhat forgotten about too. It was my anticapitalist tarot business I tried to set up after taking The Sovereign Witch class by Anna Joy. So it feels the universe wants me to think and reflect on spirituality again.
Also I want to mention, that in some magical divine timing, I found a wonderful job in my neighborhood in urban agriculture this summer that was so very much fullfilling. I liked the proximity with nature, it healed something in me (still healing now). I wouldn’t say it turned me into a ‘‘green witch’’ or anything, but it gave me a new direction for the future (I want to keep working in that field) and it feels very comfortable.
But yes, the episodes that marked me the most so far were :
Unfortunately, I do not feel like summarize them and truly make them echoed each others at the moment. I am more in the mood to expand on what they made me realize, that is that what moves me the most is collective work and that no matter how much I’m trying to be ‘‘serious and rational’’ I can’t help but be highly attracted by the spiritual/esoteric.
On the collective work side, my job actually helped me understand this sensibility of mine. I felt so invested in our collective garden and the other sites where we would garden for food sovereignity. And then when I came to work on my own little garden on my balcony I felt almost nothing, no motivation. It ties up a bit with my eating struggle : I have phases where I want to cook so bad, but I have usually no appetite to eat what I cook, unless I am with someone. Once again, I am so grateful for my job that gave me the opportunity to coordinate a team of volunteer-gardeners, like it truly empowered to hopefully, start a guerilla gardening collectif or something (maybe next summer).
About the spiritual/esoteric, I won’t go in depth here, because it is such a reccurent theme in my life, it would deserve it’s own separated piece. But basically, I guess that if I don’t get elected, I should truly try to pursue ‘‘the esoteric activist life’’ more seriously, like I think (am convinced?) it is part of my calling.
09 May 2021
Too lazy to write a coherent text, but I’ve been trying to investigate the relations between polarization, fascism and conspiracy thinking so here’s a few things about that.
Cool sources of info:
Thoughts :
- Fascism, and right-wing politics in general, relies on conspiracy thinking
- Fascism = exploitation of the alienated state of the world, the agitator takes advantage of the disenchantment and confusion people experience because of capitalism
- 7 traits of conspiracy, the acronym CONSPIR : Contradictory, Overriding suspicion, Nefarious intent, Something must be wrong, Persecuted victim, Immune to evidence, Re-interpreting randomness
- Social media accentuates the spread of conspiracies and polarization (because of algorithms, profits)
- It feels better to have an explanation than no explanation, the gap in the explanation = capitalism (and imperialism) though
- It also feels good to feel like a victim
- Idea that there is true in some of the conspiracies, and grief that comes with that (exemple : the world is indeed corrupted)
- When studying psychology, never forget the socioeconomical context around everything
- Compassion is hard but it is probably the way to go
- I should continue to investigate what is going on with this Pastel Q-Anon moment (see cancel culture as banishment)
Questions :
- While we can possibly easily reach the youth via the education system to provide them with critical thinking tools and media literacy, how do we manage to educate the adults efficiently on the same topic? If there isn’t, is the most efficient venue to solve this issue is to legislate around social media?
- Could we say that the recent right-wing editorials in Quebec’s presses are fascist? Where does it stop being right-wing and start being fascism?
- At the end of the day, does it all goes to isolation/individualism and secularisation? People fall in these rabbit hole of conspiracies to find belonging and meaning after all.
15 Apr 2021
I really want to read adrienne maree brown’s book We Will Not Cancel Us. I think we need to be really critical of cancel culture as it creates a lot of divided in our already divided left. Conspiracy theories like Pastel Q-Anon make me even more worried about how things might evolve. Accounts like caitdissociates on IG who self-proclaimed as “Pastel QAnon/Alt-Right Cult Destroyer” feed those worries. Many of their posts claim that Jay Manicom and Clementine Morrigan (who are partners) are responsible for Alt-Right Abuse Cult because Jay made his master thesis on the topic. Like… I’m studying capitalism and fascism, does it makes me a capitalist fascist? My point being that it is quite normal, even strategic, for leftists to study the right and that doesn’t mean anything. On that topic, this interesting article on cancel culture Deconstructing and critiquing the Court of Social Justice and “accountability has Jay Manicom as a case study. But it’s a recommended read, no matter if you care or not about that Jay.
Meanwhile, on my side, bits of text I’ve read a while ago came back to mind. The text was Disrupting Rape Culture (2019) by Fanghanel and covered how the BDSM community was dealing with people who do not respect boundaries. In some way, they have their own kind of cancel culture, where being called-out equals being banished, ostracised. In my opinion, the online cancel culture is quite the same : what you seek is banishment of the person, not a change in this person (even if the words say that what we seek is change in behaviors, I feel like the method/comportement says otherwise). And then people unfollow those being called-out because of respectability politics, not allowing place for the exercice of the critical mind.
In the BDSM community Fanghanel observed, she said that this banishment approach “resorts to almost pre-modern forms of policing based on punitive punishment
rather than what we might call restorative.” (p.143) She also goes more in lenght about banishment in and on itself :
A bandit is someone who is living in a state of exception without
formal recourse to the polis. In the course of my research, it was
banishment which, more than anything else, was named by members
of the community as a habitual way of dealing with transgression. For
Giorgio Agamben (1998), a bandit is stripped of legal status by the
sovereign. Excluded from the polis (and so, ‘out there’), he must exist
in a state of exception, designated by the State, beyond the beneficence
of state protection and recognition as a legal person. (p.131)
The medieval way does not seem the way to go to me.
Also another element on this very blury reflexions, from the book Silicon Values (2021), on how content-moderation began :
Facebook did not until recently take proactive measure to identify prohibited content, instead relying upon its users to police the site trough a system known as community policing or “flagging”. This system, argue Kate Crawford and Tarleton Gillespie, “act[s] as a mechanism to elicit and distribute user labor — users as a volunteer corps of regulators.” […] This practice of flagging has resulted in a culture of snitching, in which people are expected to monitor each other and report problematic activity to central authority. This form of “community policing”, like the “community standards”, is hardly about community — rather, it would more accurately be compared to the US Department of Homeland Security program called “ If You See Something, Say Something R”. Designed in the wake of 9/11 to encourage ordinary citizens to report suspicious behavior to authoritis, that program in numeros instances led to the reporting of innocent people of color to law enforcement for dubious reason. (p.17)
How much have we internalized this flagging culture and how does it play with cancel culture? Of course, people of color aren’t the people the most being reported on, for once, but I think it doesn’t help at the end of the day. Like yes, maybe cancelling people does protect our community in some way. But also, maybe by targeting even more and more white people for mistakes of theirs, or unlearning they haven’t done yet, we are scaring potential allies (culture of “we cannot say anything anymore”) and isolate ourselves further more, which, at the end of the day, is more of a victory for white supremacists than for us.
White people cannot become perfect antiracist allies without interacting with BIPOC people, it’s sad but true. A white person can read all the the book on antiracism, but reading alone is not praxis, even if you want it to be praxis. You need real people, real situations, to learn. Therefore, it sucks but it’s part of the game. Also, while it is true that we must condemn harms done voluntarily, we also need to recognize that hurt people hurt people. We are all hurting under this system. Compassion is often the way to go.
21 Mar 2021
I am currently reading many wonderful books, among them The Communism of Love by Richard Gilman-Opalsky. In there the author does brilliant work at summarizing the theory of so many interesting people and I would like to mention one of them right now. It is nobody else than Bernard Stiegler’s ideas that sparked something in me today. As he tries to theorize the “societies of control” we live in today, he acknowledges that people in power
seem incapable of confronting —or unwilling to confront— the fact that things may be “uncontrollable” precisely because they are really beyond our control. Societies of control resist thinking about the category of the “uncontrollables,” so they try to control everything —terrorism, drug abuse, and borders— and they often fail to notice that their efforts are met with measurable increases of behaviors they aim to diminish. (p.196)
That was said in the chapter Love as Praxis : Critical Theory and Psychoanalysis where was examined the loneliness epidemic and the general lack of meaning and sense of self many people experience nowadays. Later, the author adds :
Stiegler confesses his fear. He is worried about his children and their futures, and he knows that the problems we face are beyond the control of the apparatuses of established power today, if they ever were under control at all. The only thing Stiegler can think to do is to return in the end to the subject of love: “Our epoch does not love itself. And a world that does not love itself is a world that does not believe in the world: we can believe only in what we love.” (p.197, my emphasis)
This frame opened my eyes in new ways and somewhat resonated with ideas from Zizek’s recent book on the pandemic, where he stresses the importance of a strong relations of trust between states and their people to maybe establish some new form of disaster communism in face of the rise of barbarism. The precise passage that came in mind was the following :
Carlo Ginzburg proposed the notion that being ashamed of one’s country, not love of it, may be the true mark of belonging to it. (p.43)
When I read this the first time, it made me laugh as I thought “wow I really belong here then”. And since then I often daydream about formulating a theory of some form of anti-nationalism from this starting point, but that is somewhat unrelated to Spiegler. In this moment, I don’t think Ginzburg’s proposition can apply to Spiegler’s concern. Because I feel that there’s a lot of apathy involved in the “disliking of the world” that would somewhat diluted the shame.
But yeah, it’s still food for thought. It might sounds like a weird detour, but Spiegler’s affirmation that “the problems we face are beyond the control of the apparatuses of established power” also sounds like some kind of relief from my activist mind? As in since it is beyond everything/everybody’s control, it is so very normal that we are all struggling to make this world a better place, and also if “we are falling apart” despite our collective efforts, like we shouldn’t feel too much guilty about it maybe? Like let’s just try and try and accept there will never be perfect solutions. Or in Keller Easterling’s words in Medium Design : Knowing How to Work on the World :
Instead of seeking solutions alone, you can address dilemmas with responses that do not always work. Multiplying problems can be helpful. Messiness is smarter than newness. Obligations are more empowering than freedom. (p.19)