CLA of the Gods[1]
Marcus Bussey
University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia
I had the good fortune to meet Sohail Inayatullah in Kolkata in December 1989. This small slice of biography is important as his personal and intellectual path showed me that I could break free of the gravity of ‘small’, find my own escape velocity, and leap into the Cosmos of possibilities. And leap I did! This early meeting also meant that I got to connect with him and his partner, Ivana Milojević in 1993 when they moved to Brisbane, Australia. This was when the method now known as Causal Layered Analysis was fermenting. It is important to use metaphors like ‘ferment’ because as Inayatullah makes clear (see Ramos’ (2003) interview with him) the personal and metaphorical is so deeply entwined with the theoretical.
Indeed, the personal weaves throughout my relationship with CLA. It has fermented in me, but also fermented me. I illustrate this point through a ‘CLA of self’ in which the individual I is scattered amongst the elements of doings and tastings that is litany. I teach, I create in classroom and kitchen, scatter words of poetry or theory. I play with ideas but also things. I walk in the forest and touch the trees and (vainly) try to count the leaves. The individual I of the social world works in communities and universities, but really this systems me is a collective ‘we’ of sticky relationships, that sits embedded in human and more than human processes that support me but also disciplines me. My systems I, walks in the forest and hears the sap moving and the microbial work of Ages in the soils and mulch. The I described here inhabits a worldview of relationship and story. This is a spiritual shamanic place of magical encounters and dancing play. It is alive to all we do! And as I fall through the cracks in the floor of Being I enter the place of the rhizome… Here, as the metaphor me wriggles and squirms amongst the detritus of cultures old and new, I continue to ferment until one day I become another fallen leaf on the forest floor.
As CLA emerged I found it spoke deeply to me both as method and as a taxonomical approach to the world (Bussey, 2014a). Yet for me the aesthetic dimension of CLA is quite exceptional. CLA offers an ordering of perception that is deceptively simple. I use ‘perception’ here as the broad term to cover the way we make sense of the world. This sense making is always subjective and always alive, fermenting in us. It is not static. So, I see CLA offering an open map, like Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomes[2] (1987), that squirm and shift through the ongoing motion of an individual subjectivity in discourse with their many worlds: the human and the more-than-human; the mythic, cosmic, cultural, spiritual, historical and of course individual and collective futures (see figure 1). I like this mobility that the rhizomic brings to CLA (Bussey, 2009). Through this metaphor context can be understood as relational, relative, multiple and organic. It emphasises the process orientation of things and thus disrupts the apparent stability of any moment allowing us to experience context as co-created, unique, ephemeral and internally logical (coherent) and alive.
Figure 1: Computer generated rhizomes[3]
A rhizomic CLA has allowed me to play with it rather than feel caught in its structure. In a world of rules, sigh (Graeber, 2015), we have been conditioned to follow the map rather than play with it. Co-creation calls for play. Maps are tools for meaning making and should be treated with a playful touch. CLA is not Google Maps (though I admit to enjoying this application). Rather CLA is a cosmolocal process (see Ramos et al, 2021) that recognises the local and intimate always involved in the generation of a patterned, patterning and sensuous set of causal relationships (Bussey, 2014b, 2019). CLA captures these relationships yes, but it is not about capture in the stricter sense of the word. CLA is playful. So, the metaphor of the rhizome works for me, yet it avoids metaphoric capture and the imposition of limits because it refuses to be tied down (Bussey, 2013). In fact, metaphoric capture leads to end game scenarios. It is psychically violent. The human spirit is resistant to metaphoric capture though we often live and struggle within the cages of our metaphors.
As Minna Salami notes, ‘Liberation is the reinvention of the self’ (2020). CLA facilitates this liberation and reinvention by exposing and then challenging the metaphors underpinning our ‘realities’. I reflect on this conditioned struggle in the following poem:
Sensuous knowledge, visceral and aching,
Marrow of memory scratching patterns on the
Besmirched walls of consciousness… Those strange
Striations that point beyond shadow and stain
To the Mother, who sits waiting patiently
For renegade children, to return to her womb,
For renewal, rebirth and the reclaiming of stories.
This activity of doing and undoing, the calling of our time,
Frames life and frequents the lonely pathways that the lost take
When selfhood becomes hallmark and terminus,
Denying the inter-being that is the solid ground
Upon which we stand. (in Chakravorty et al, 2022, p. 53)
Sensuous knowledge speaks to the inner longings of the human heart. It is cosmolocal in that it links the personal intimate nature of knowing with life’s ‘doing and undoing’ as an ongoing ‘calling’ (Bussey, 2020). Mother Gaia sits at its heart, facing off with the Anthropocene (‘renegade children’) in all its grand isolation. We long to be whole; to return to the Mother, to shed our constraining metaphors, to cast off our limitations. Yet as ‘renegade children’ we deny our bodies, our embodiment and the knowing that accompanies it. A possible CLA of the Anthropocene would place linear and discrete knowledge and the illusions of control/no-control at the worldview level and disembodiment as a primary myth-metaphor. I find the Anthropocene hard work as it is a closed dead end. It denies (or severely constrains) the possibilities for escape and transcendence that I long for.
In fact, I argue that it is this longing that makes our species so restless. Spiritually it is what Prabhat Rainjan Sarkar called ‘Longing for the Great’ (1997, p. 72); existentially it is what drives us to be creative and innovative (Bussey, 1999), always looking to escape the limits we fight against yet paradoxically impose (Bussey, 2013); materially, it is also what supports capitalist accumulation and the extractive madness of modernity. In fact, if I might be so bold, it is longing to explore and test limits that has created the ‘Anthropocene’!
For me the Anthropocene is a mythic rhizome, a modern variant on the ‘end-of-days’ story that the West has nurtured for two millennia. In this guise the Anthropocene is a label that explodes our temporal referents. It is, as Timothy Morton (2013) asserts, a ‘hyperobject’. For many it is something deeply, existentially disturbing; for others it is too big to worry about. Either way, the Anthropocene is a temporal earthquake that we need to consider when we think about ‘longing’ and the mythic source of human storytelling (Fremeaux and Jordan, 2021). This of course is where CLA comes in. CLA acts as a ‘map’, in the sense Deleuze and Guattari are talking about when discussing the rhizome. The work with CLA over the past 30 years has been fantastic, but for me what is key is its ability to open us up to the mythic, the mantric as Inayatullah himself puts it.
“The mantra process helps imagine creating a new future, an authentic future. It adds a feeling dimension to the rational act of creating alternative and preferred futures. It moves the participant to see and act differently in the present” (2022, p. 61).
For me the mantra is the referent point to an aesthetic predisposition. It orients us to our worlds, potentially recasting our pasts and our futures in an ongoing folding. This I capture in the poem CLA of the Gods (2019). Here I describe litany as Dust; system as Order; worldview as Knowing and Myth/Metaphor as Dreaming. I think it is pretty self-explanatory. So will not offer to gloss it. I share it here because I appreciate greatly what Inayatullah has contributed to my own self exploration – the ‘inner CLA’ as he would call it. Perhaps this poem will open up some new dimension for you, the reader, but if not, please take it as some fun and look at playing with CLA in order to amplify its creative, transformative potential.
Click on the following audio to listen “CLA of the Gods”
Dust! It sits on everything.
Noise and crackle, fizz and pop
a child’s cry and a woman’s tear.
Raucous laughter of the soldier shitting himself.
Bullets flying, dust again and more tears.
Chaosmos as unravelling lives.
No rhyme no reason
Just the ceaseless churning of events.
Order! Making sense of the chaos
Managing in the madness, diligent
Efficient in our ongoing quest for more order.
Libraries, and politicians, armies and forests
Children in rows and hospital beds, all shiny;
KPIs and the cosa nostra
worry about the encroaching madness
Entropic dance, a mad coven and
the conspiracies of the powerful.
Knowing! Yes, a theory of everything
to hold it all together, a pattern to keep us safe.
That’s what we need. I know by dint of the effort to know,
the business of testing, validating and verifying;
dispel uncertainty if I can, if not
then theorise paradox, play with it
make it less painful, less intolerable
Embrace the fault and then turn back to certitudes if I can.
Dreaming! Let’s find metaphors swimming like Koi
graceful, lithe and troublesome too.
The slippery dreams of Dalits and pundits
and the forgeries of false prophets
all scurry for cover when we hack their possibilities,
challenge the minotaur of sweet forgetfulness.
The numbing security of habit sits in the cave,
where Apollo and the Buddha play dice
and Mohammed has a nap amongst
cedar trees and Jesus crushes olives to ease
Socrates chapped feet. Here
We are all gods if we but knew it!
***
By way of a conclusion, I see our approach to the world as an active, interactive, co-creational dreaming: the metaphoric tangle of being with, in and of the world. Our knowing is premised on our dreaming, there is no ‘reason’ that is not founded on deeply personal emotive assumptions about being, identity and this world[4]. Again, the knowing is entangled or as Nora Bateson would say, transcontextual (see her poem in: Chakraborty et al, 2022, pp. 20-21). This transcontextuality is what establishes the orders of knowing, the disciplinary systems of knowing, acting in and especially today, acting upon the world. Acting ‘upon’ is of course part of the problem, but that is another story. And of course, all activity is ‘work’ and work stirs up the dust that is litany. Yet because of our deep longing, memory and foresight and agency too, gets refracted into the world of action, so that, as poet David Rowbotham puts it: “Pray speak beauty, but dust first spoke”.
Bussey, M. (1999). The Healing Eye: Artistic Vision in the Thought of Prabhat Rainjan Sarkar. In S. Inayatullah, and Fitzgerald, Jennifer (Ed.), Transcending Boundaries: prabhat Rainjan Sarkar’s Theories of Individual and Social Transformation (pp. 131-145). Maleny, Australia: Gurukula Press.
Bussey, M. (2009). Six Shamanic Concepts: Exploring the Between in Futures Work. foresight, 11(2), 29-42.
Bussey, M. (2013). Re-Imagining Limits. Sociological Bulletin, 62(1), 129-131.
Bussey, M. (2014a). CLA as Process: Mapping the Theory and Practice of the Multiple. Journal of Futures Studies, 18(4), 45-58.
Bussey, M. (2014b). Intimate Futures: Bringing the body into futures work. European Journal of Futures Research, 2(53), 1-8.
Bussey, M. (2019). ‘We shall rise’: Intimate theory and embodied dissent. In Dynamics of Dissent (pp. 137-153): Routledge India.
Bussey, M. (2019a). The Next Big Thing! Delhi: Studera Press.
Bussey, M. (2020). ‘We shall rise’: Intimate theory and embodied dissent. In J. R. Clammer, Chakravorty, Meera., Bussey, Marcus., and Banerjee, Tanmayee (Ed.), Dynamics of Dissent: Theorizing Movements for Inclusive Futures (pp. 137-153). New York: Routledge.
Chakravorty, M., Author, Mozzini-Alister, Camila. and Giri, Ananta Kumar (Ed.) (2022). Beyond Alienation, Hatred and Terror: Compatriots with Love and Living-Kind. New Delhi: Authors Press.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). London & New York: Continuum.
Fremeaux, I., and Jordan, Jay. (2021). We are ‘Nature’ Defending Itself. London: Pluto Press.
Graeber, D. (2015). The utopia of rules: On technology, stupidity, and the secret joys of bureaucracy: Melville House.
Inayatullah, S. (2022). From Anticipation to Empancipation. s: toward a stage theory of the uses of the future.Journal of Futures Studies Monograph. 1, 61,
Morton, T. (2013). Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology at the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press.
Ramos, J. M. (2003). From Critique To Cultural Recovery: Critical futures studies and Causal Layered Analysis. Melbourne: Australian Foresight Institute: Swinburne University of Technology.
Ramos, J., Bauwens, Michel., Ede, Sharon., and Wong, James Gien (Ed.) (2021). The Cosmo-Local Reader. Melbourne: Futures Lab.
Salami, M. (2020). Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone. London: Amistad.
Sarkar, P. R. (1997). Subhasita Samgraha (Vol. 24). Calcutta: Ananda Marga Publications.
- This poem appeared in my collection of poetry: Bussey 2019a ↑
- For instance, they define the rhizome: “… the rhizome pertains to a map that must be produced,constructed, a map that is always detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exits and its own lines of flight” (1987, p. 21). ↑
- Creative Commons: https://bluelabyrinths.com/2015/07/15/the-web-as-rhizome-in-deleuze-and-guattari/ ↑
- See this for more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHvn4CoKkZw&t=9s ↑
