Neo-Animist Decalogue
1 - Although coming from an animist conception that everything in the world has a soul that each existence expresses according to it’s body and substance, the term neo-animism occurs to name an action program made to question the humanist paradigm that dominates and conducts the march of the world, enlarged to the whole human species practices and responsibilities but exclusively under the imperative and enforced grammar made by a small part of it. To the Neo-Animists the proposal and the implementation of said program is the first task. This program, however, does not seek to only take references coming from the grammar of the animist paradigm but also from all the cultural or civilizational paradigms from past and present everywhere in the world where human species has produced or is producing interrogations, reflections, inventions, concepts, rules and ways of action.
South Africa
2 – The humanist paradigm, imposed on the whole species by way of the total westernization of the world, and recurring ideological and idealist placement of the earth on center of the universe, and of man in the center of all creation and on the side of the divine, in opposition to the rest of nature, by looking to assure, in the center of all creation, a place of election and privilege for man, necessarily produces places of election and privilege for certain men and groups of people and incessantly promotes impasses that put on jeopardy the luck and fate of the whole species and maybe even of creation in its whole (not managing by that to solve or nullify the former impasses that created new ones). The species, in general, has now total conscience of this fact, and that explains the profusion of catrastophist alerts from the present second rate political and civic actions.
Big Hole, SA
3 – All dissent, even revolutionary, has, all along humanist history, taken as proposition, adoption or imposition solutions inside the same humanist paradigm. The Neo-animists understand that what matters is to challenge the humanist paradigm in itself . It is to them the first task and they will always take care in looking for the foundations of the varied paradigms instead of finding themselves trapped by issues of modality within the humanist paradigm.
4 – The neo-humanist intervention, recognizing that although the humanist paradigm dynamics enforce, have enforced and will enforce to the whole of the habited and inhabited world ( a undeniable and unstoppable fact, culturally integrated in the creational and transformational dynamics that assist the whole species) proposes to evoke, towards the recuperation and adequation of all man to be, actions, understandings and politics fundamented in other paradigms equally produced by the cultures of man, and the evocation of all available knowledges, either recognized or not, including knowledges coming from humanist productions beyond those situated in the fields of sciences and ideologies, such as knowledges and poetry. Neo-animist also know that the transformative dynamics of the species are an heritage to the species itself and not only of those that the humanist paradigm produces or tames.
Kimberley, SA
5 – The indexation of all humanist impasse past and present and probably future is a neoanimist task. For example: the economic system produced and introduced by the humanist paradigm collapses when the economy stops growing. The species present, however, indicates a recession in the demographic growth in Europe predictably spreading to the rest of the globe. Hence the perspective of a consumption recession, hence…
Marta Mestre, Luhuna e Ruy Duarte de Carvalho, SA
6 – According to what seems to have always happened, since it’s most removed past, the course of humanist paradigm run history has leaded to evident and major excesses (for example: low empire, the middle ages, the critique of pure reason, scientism). Itself, the humanist paradigm, through the dissent it produces, evokes reasons and other knowledges (Plotino/Porfirío, Renassaince, Leibniz/De Vico – preventing against progress – romanticism, Dada-surrealism). It is what is to happen now and that explains the emergence of heterodoxal proposals in face of the exhaustion and the spectacle of remedies and catastrophisms… the indexation of all critiques to humanism, to the dictatorship of scientific reasoning, to the ideology of progress, to the empire of technological coercion and to dynamics of delirious and autophagic growth is a neo-animist task.
6 – Criticizing or fighting the humanist paradigm and prognosting the recuperation of equilibrium politics, the neo-animists strive to relocate the performance and free existence of people in equilibrium, precisely, with the common interest of people, all people and all creation.
7 – It’s not up to the neo-animists to invent anything or to feel forced to do so. On the contrary it is to insist on the evocation of all knowledges and on the review of all data, documents and materials available. They might reveal other answers, having both time and situation changed, that go beyond those found by former researchers or even by those who collected them or put them in order.
8 – Neo-animism is not a school, a church, a sect, a party, a group or an underground cell. Understanding that even though the humanist paradigm doesn’t own the exclusive on the ways, the measures and the modes necessary and pertinent on the conduction of life and work of the species in the terrains of earth and world, the neo-animist do not loose sight that their own emergence as movement with its characteristics occurs and owes to the empire and run of the humanist paradigm.
9 – Admitting then that although it is a part of the world’s and men’s condition the unsettling evidence that the mysterious ways of existence implicate life in society and an unavoidable apparatus of institutions, leaderships, delegations and collective rules of resource management, behavior control and relationship coverage, neo-animists plan to act and make themselves heard because they feel that the humanist paradigm does not contain the exclusivity of ways, measures and disposals necessary to life in society and does not always adopt those that would seem more adequate to the integration of the situation it generates, imposes, sustains and reproduces. Other paradigms set aside and hidden from consideration because they originate in cultures dominated or annihilated by the western world, might be rescued and adapted to reread situations taking place now, or invented from the reconsideration of it’s fundamentals, stigmatized as archaic by the forceful processes of western civilization. This might be valid and pertinent to the exercise both of power and control politics and to those of reproduction and maintenance of the species and personal expression and knowledge.
10 – we are all together, all in the same boat, all the men and all that exists in the whole universe. And if there are other universes, so will them, still, be with us on the same boat. And god is not an entity…it is the totality of a non-understandable creative process in the becoming which each one of us, Person, Animal, Rock, Grass, Star, Asteroid, Wind, Blow and Whisper, Pain and Grief, Joy and Glory, is a unbreakable and inseparable part…
written in 2009
