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WAYPOINTS: Towards an ecology of political mindfulness

September 20, 2019 by normd

We are living through disturbed and disturbing times in which the maps drawn by political scientists no longer make sense of what is happening on the ground. Against this background the propagandists of neo-liberal individualism urge us to cultivate ‘resilience’ and ‘mindfulness’ as a way of seizing and surviving the present moment. Mindfulness in particular has been popularised as a way of promoting well-being by enabling people suffering from anxiety or depression to become more aware of internal mental states and their relation to external circumstances.

But what if this concept is applied not just to the adaptive strategies of an individual psyche but to the state of health of the body politic? It might then help us focus more precisely on how the stresses and strains of our everyday lives are connected to the social structures we inhabit. It might, for example, help us understand more concretely how issues, of race, gender, generation and class shape the most intimate registers of our being in the world.

From this starting point, the book charts a journey, at once intellectual andexistential, across the fault lines of our conflicted society and divided selves.It brings together writings occasioned by recent political and personalevents in an attempt to grasp their inter-connection in what is flashing pastbefore it disappears into a fog of reminiscence or rhetoric. Many of the pieces collected here are this kind of auto-ethnographic reportage. Others, more essayistic in form, step back to think more strategically about some of the deeper processes at work in our increasingly uncivil society.

The first part of the book traces the seismic shifts taking place in thelandscape of British politics, culminating in the Brexit vote, focussing on their cultural and ideological underpinnings. This is followed by a series
of engagements with actual, mostly urban, landscapes, as they change underfoot, and suggests some possible ways of notating that encounter both at home and away. The next section explores personal memoryscapes of love and loss and their implications for understanding the dislocated times we are living through. The book concludes with a series of essays about the contemporary conditions of cultural production as these inform the poesis of singular arts practices.

Across these topics, Phil Cohen begins to map out an ecology of critical awareness as a timely antidote to the mindlessness currently being promoted through our political culture with its knee jerk responses to the multiple crises we face.

394 pages 133x203mm perfect bound RRP: £20 Publication date: October 2019 978-1-9164719-5-5 (PDF) 978-1-9164719-6-2 (Paperback)

Available soon from EYEGLASS BOOKS

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Phil’s Blogs

UNEASY LIES THE HEAD : ON LOSING THE ROYAL TOUCH  NOW AND THEN

Note: This is a revised and updated text of an article  originally published in Livingmaps Review  and posted online in 2021. It is due to … [Read More...] about UNEASY LIES THE HEAD : ON LOSING THE ROYAL TOUCH  NOW AND THEN

ON LIVING IN A GREY ZONE

This text is an introduction to  Waypoints Volume 2 ,  a new collection of occasional writings  from the last five years  to be published  in the … [Read More...] about ON LIVING IN A GREY ZONE

The Map, the Territory and the Fog of War

This is an edited version of a talk given to the opening session of ‘Cartography on the Front Line’ seminar series, at the British Library on October … [Read More...] about The Map, the Territory and the Fog of War

Recent Posts

UNEASY LIES THE HEAD : ON LOSING THE ROYAL TOUCH  NOW AND THEN

Things Ain’t What They Used To Be

ON LIVING IN A GREY ZONE

On being left behind : the haunting legacies of London 2012

Cartographies of Violence/Rhetorics of War

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