A Manifesto of Revival: Politics and Poetics in the Anthropocene

Andreas Weber (1967) is a German biologist, philosopher, biosemiotician and journalist. As an independent scholar, he explores a new understanding of life as meaning, or “biopoetics” (“poetic ecology”). See more of Weber’s texts on the Pilgrim website. Hildegard Kurt (1958) is a German cultural researcher, associate professor of social sculpture, founder and director of the Institute for Art, Culture and the Future in Berlin (2004). For many years, she has collaborated with Joseph Beuys’s student Shelley Sachs on researching and using Beuys’s concept of social sculpture as an expanded understanding of art. In 2015, together with Andreas Weber, she founded the “cultures of living” program at the Institute for Art, Culture and the Future in Berlin, focusing on developing a “politics of life”. This manifesto was first published as a separate publication in German under the title Lebendigkeit sei! Für eine Politik des Lebens. Ein Manifesto für das Anthropozän in thinkOya (Klein Jasedow 2015). This translation is based on an expanded version of the manifesto, published under the title "The Enlivenement Manifesto: Politics and Poetics in the Anthropocene" in the magazine KOSMOS journal for global transformation in the summer of 2016.

Czech translation: Jiří Zemánek, including translations of quotations from poems by Wallace Stevens, William Wordsworth, Gary Snyder and Gerald Manley Hopkins. Translations of quotations from poems by Mary Oliver: Šimon Grimmich; quotations from poems by Jane Hirschfield: Luděk Čertík; quotations from poems by EE Cummings and Loren Eiseley: Luboš Snížek.

“Man and woman Are one. Man and woman and the blackbird Are one.” — Wallace Stevens / Thirteen Ways to Look at a Blackbird

Enlightenment thinking is coming to an end today. The “Anthropocene” demands a transcendence of the dualism of man versus nature. Culture is everywhere. This could be an opportunity for sustainable action: saving nature becomes a cultural endeavor. However, the welcoming of the Anthropocene as stewardship of the world obscures the silent imprisonment of life within technoculture and bioeconomy. Civilization still operates as if reality were about organizing inert dead matter in the most efficient ways possible. Sustainability cannot be achieved with the current operating system of economics, politics, and culture as long as that basic “bios” – our unconscious assumption about what reality is – remains tied to the ideology of dead matter. Nature is threatened at a profound level by disregarding the principles of the fruitful imaginative interpenetration that shapes all life.

The real opportunity of the “Anthropocene” is to create a new bios for our thinking – a bios of revitalization. This means understanding that man and nature belong to a reality that creates embodied processes of transformative relationships, expressive meaning and real interiority in biological subjects. The significance of the “revitalization” perspective is comparable to the shift that occurred in modern physics, which realized that every observer is connected to the system that he observes. Biological interconnectedness occurs in an emotional and experiential way through sharing liveliness with other living subjects. In line with this, the “politics of life” strives for a civilization in which institutions and economic practices pursue the maximum of what life should be; it seeks to free subjects from subordination to the ideology of dead matter and grant them the right to embodied agency and meaningful experience. This is not easy to achieve, because it requires a profound change in our perception of reality. The “bios” of “revival” will require a long-term commitment that can be compared to the fight for universal human rights.

Key concepts

• The current ideology of dead matter, mechanical causality, including the exclusion of experience from descriptions of reality in ecology and economics, are responsible for our failure to protect the vitality of our world.
• The challenge of the “Anthropocene” and the end of the dualistic Enlightenment style of thinking is to introduce a new “bios” into our conception of reality; to place aliveness at its center, that is, to understand the world as a living process of mutually transforming relationships, subjectivity, and expression: a vision of “revival.”
• The reach of the “revival” perspective is equal to the shift that has occurred in modern physics, which has realized that every observer is connected to the system they observe. Biological connectedness occurs emotionally and experientially through sharing aliveness with other living entities and through our existential relating to them.
• Discoveries in the life sciences, especially in biosemiotics, cognitive research, and developmental biology, show the need to understand organisms as purposeful agents who, as physically relevant forces, bring meaning and experience to the world.
• We need a “politics of life” as a new political-philosophical stance to develop “deep sustainability”; a stance that allows us to replace the idea of reality as the repetition of “empirical facts” with an “empirical subjectivity” of shared aliveness and a “poetic objectivity” that describes and practices relationality and mutual transformation.

Dualism is over

"You don't have to be good, you don't have to crawl on your knees a hundred miles across the desert in repentance. You just have to let the gentle animal in your body like what it likes." — Mary Oliver / Wild Geese

A new, groundbreaking vision of humanity is rapidly spreading into the mainstream of our self-understanding. We are no longer separate from nature, and so a new view is emerging: we are woven into it. Some authors even claim that nature and humans are one and the same.(1) This understanding comes to us not simply as a philosophical statement, but rather as an empirical realization. The cultural image that humans have of themselves has become a matter of science. Traces of pesticides, nuclear pollution, and artificial nitrogen fertilizers can now be found in the crystals of Arctic ice and in the soil of the Amazon. Climate change has demonstrated that humans are inextricably linked to the Earth and its systems.

These are the signs of the “Anthropocene,” or, as some call it, the geological “epoch of humanity.” The term “Anthropocene” was first used as a geological term by atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen.(2) Crutzen argued that the extent of human dominance over the biosphere had overturned the notion that nature was separate from humans, marking the end of the Holocene.

We still do not fully realize that the shift in the geological calendar, named by Crutzen, clearly heralded a new cultural epoch. In this new age, which has just begun, nature and mind are no longer separate. The duality between nature and culture, which originated in Enlightenment thinking, has been overcome, and that is great news. The dualism that has determined our thinking and our actions for two hundred and fifty years is over. The Enlightenment is gone.(1)

Technology and science have paradoxically overcome their dualism through an obsessive adherence to it. Our civilization has long believed that the Earth is an object separate from man, while unknowingly proving the opposite.

In one sense, we should feel relieved. Because what started the current ecological catastrophe—including global warming and the wave of species losses in the current “sixth mass extinction”—was precisely the rift in our thinking that opened between nature, perceived as a mindless resource, and us human agents as rational actors.(3)

Many argue that the starting point for a new idea of sustainability and conservation is to be found in the Anthropocene. Since nature and culture are assumed to be one, humans should consequently become responsible for the Earth system. As the argument suggests, humans must become responsible stewards of the entire natural-cultural Earth, since they have completely permeated it.(4) From this perspective, sustainability is seen as a more attractive and compelling concept: it no longer means protecting the “other” but cultivating ourselves.

An old delusion with a new charm 

“And if two people have loved each other, watch how love endures between their bodies like a scar, growing stronger, darker, and prouder; how that black cord makes them one substance, indestructible and irreparable.” — Jane Hirschfield, What Binds Us

However, the relief we associate with the Anthropocene is not justified. The reconciliation between humans and nature, which many Anthropocene proponents proclaim, is unfolding as a general victory of culture, which negates the possibility of understanding and protecting life and vitality. What is celebrated as the end of dualism is in fact a new hidden self-aggrandizement of humanity, an attitude that once again threatens to transform nature into a project of cultivation and control. Psychologists call this situation “double bind,” that is, saying one thing but doing the opposite.

Seventy years ago, philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno pointed out this blind spot when they criticized the Enlightenment style of thinking. They considered this thinking “totalitarian like any system” and argued that its “falsehood” lies in the fact that “the outcome is decided from the very beginning. The world domination of nature turns against the thinking subject itself…” Horkheimer and Adorno wrote their analysis in the first half of the last century. But has the situation really changed since then? (5)

Leading advocates of the Anthropocene still interpret connection as “difference and domination,” and reconnection with other living beings is enacted as the domination of humans over everything, including ourselves. If all life is understood as culture, human supremacy over nature has not ended. Instead, the human realm has permeated nature in a way that is a kind of hostile takeover.(6)

Many see the Anthropocene as a revolutionary change. However, many of its concepts are entirely indebted to industrial modernism in the image homo faber, which controls nature with technical tools. Contemporary thinking increasingly emphasizes everything that represents artificiality and “creativity.” “Cyborg” and even “monster” have become frequently used metaphors for understanding our relationship to reality.(7)

While the emphasis on technical control has changed its face on the outside, it persists deep down, leading to a general celebration of “hybrid structures” that reflect our deep fascination with human-made artifacts, such as data interfaces that expand our awareness, or ecosystems that have multiple roles and function as museums of species or as highly productive agricultural fields.

The idea of the Anthropocene as an epoch of humanity gives new validity to ideologies of objectification, manipulation and control, the true extent of which is hidden behind the optimism and fashionable rhetoric of collective eco-technological efforts and “win-win” situations. As a result of such marketing, industrial countries are able to exploit the myth of reconciliation between nature and technology to promote a profit-oriented bio-economy, exploit global technological markets and thus secure economic and agro-technological dominance. As has long been observed, such a move is described even in the very concept of sustainability, which has mutated from an originally eco-social concept into a mere catchy advertising phrase.

Even the “green economy” is stuck in this position. The monetization of nature and the creation of speculative financial instruments from “ecosystem services” have led the green economy down a path of privatization and scarcity, obscuring the subjective dimension of living nature and depriving human communities of the right to enter into meaningful relationships with their environment.(8)

If we believe that humans and nature can only be reconciled when technology dominates the Earth, and if we can accept such a supposed reconciliation because we have convinced ourselves that nature always bears a cultural imprint, we have prevented ourselves from seeing that every material exchange transforms the imaginative space of this world. We continue to overlook the interior and meaningful dimension of all living things. (9, 10) 

For more liveliness

“You blessed creatures, I have heard you calling; I know now that heaven laughs with your joy; my heart is at your feast, my crown is on my head, and I feel the fullness of your blessing.” — William Wordsworth, Ode: Announcing Immortality

Most of the problems of our culture have a common origin in our view of reality as dead.

The economic, political, and educational mainstream sees the world as being made of simple, inanimate building blocks that can be improved—without limitation—by analyzing the basic elements and constantly reconstructing them using appropriate technological, economic, or ecological tools. (11, 12)

However, scholars today increasingly understand reality as a network of mutually transforming meaningful relationships that are experienced by subjects. From this perspective, creativity and poetic expression, which since historical modernity have been reserved exclusively for the realm of culture, become essential elements of reality.

This approach is not a utopia. It has its roots in the current revolution in biological thinking, which resembles the revolutions in physics that occurred about a century ago with the theory of relativity and quantum physics. Humans and nature are one, because creative imagination and the expression of feelings are forces of nature - it is the only way to unite the isolated realms of matter and culture. (9, 11)

However, we can observe the dialectic that comes to our rescue and that Horkheimer and Adorno had in mind when they formulated their Dialectics of Enlightenment (Dialectic of Enlightenment), never saw coming.(5) The insights gained in the natural sciences have forced us to reconnect rational understanding with the practice of imaginative vividness. It is natural science that, by applying its principle of empirical objectivity, is now discovering its opposite in the depths of the unfolding biosphere: meaningful subjectivity. According to the findings of empirical biology, which follows a semiotic approach, living beings are no longer understood as machines but as subjects carrying meaning. Subjective experience, rooted in matter, represents the only possible mode of biological organization.(10-13) Therefore, after the Enlightenment, we must strive for a “revitalization” capable of closing the gap between subjective experience and objective description.(14)

This attitude can create a counterbalance to our fixation on technical – to analysis and reconstruction – and to shift our attention to poiesis, to our embodied symbolic imagination with its existential experiences of living values. When we pay homage poiesis, we understand life as a phenomenon in which matter reveals a tendency to form individuals that are able to self-reproduce and self-maintain, which provides them with a meaningful perspective.

Because we are part of this creative network of relationships, we can gather knowledge about it not as a measuring device, but in a way that is understandable to living beings. The "truth" of nature (as opposed to the "untruth" of the totalitarian system of reality, dominated by the dualistic view that Horkheimer and Adorno analyzed so deeply) lies in its creative openness, in its constant provision of life, rather than in its romantic sense of being "beneficial" or "curative."

To preserve the biosphere, we must focus our efforts on the image of living reality. We must imagine a new “bios.” At the deepest level, nature is threatened not only by the breakdown of biochemical circulation and species balance, but also by the disregard for the principles of the fertile imaginative interweaving that shapes our existence. The characteristics of this threatened but essential aliveness are openness, diversity, potentiality, mutual exchange of gifts, transformation, and the existential paradox of solitude and unity. (15, 16)

Experiencing the world as alive helps us reevaluate our relationships with other people, with other beings, and with matter. We can stop using these connections as tools for resource extraction. We can only survive the Anthropocene well if we realize that humans not only permeate nature, but are made of something that cannot be consciously created by humans – a self-organizing aliveness that is deeply intertwined with ecosystems in terms of metabolism and metaphor. 

The creative power inherent in reality cannot be stopped. Underestimating or ignoring it, as we have done so far and as we still do, is dangerous to life and ultimately destructive. Ignoring reality will always generate dramatic clashes with it. Therefore, the most important task in the Anthropocene is to rethink and restore liveliness.

What can humanity be? 

"May my heart always be open to the birds, who are the secret of life, whatever they sing, knowledge surpasses, and the people who do not hear them are old"! — EE Cummings 

A future for humanity, based on ecological and social justice, will only be possible if we can empathically restore our concrete human manifestation of what constitutes embodied existence—that is, the right middle ground where aliveness and creativity seek to experience themselves. We may call these qualities “soul,” “heart,” “the spiritual nature of man” (Erich Fromm) (17), or the irreducible and indomitable “wilderness” (Gary Snyder)(18). These qualities form the basis of all life and are exercised by us humans in a specifically human cultural way.

Such an understanding of humanity as aliveness is based on the possibility of discovering a specifically human interpretation of aliveness. Therefore, we can never be completely reconciled with living reality. Any such view that claims to have discovered a shortcut to avoid the exhausting actions, pitfalls, and creative improvisations of the subject's life in its relationships represents a new utopian version of control. We do not, however, need another impossible Utopia, but we must acknowledge our creative fragility. Only through it are we connected to the infinite capacity of the living imagination and always open to healing.(14)

Today, there are many sources from which the recovery stance can find inspiration and support for its philosophical, economic, social and scientific dimensions – such as the “capability approach” of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum (19, 20); the “barefoot economics” of Manfred Max-Neef, based on human needs (21); or noon thought Albert Camus – self-restraint, based on poetic and sensual experience, which the French philosopher called the “Mediterranean spirit”.(22)

We can see this attitude already in practice in the economics of the commons, proposed by Silke Helfrich (23), David Bollier (24), and Nobel Prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom (25); in the “dialogics” of philosopher Edgar Morin (26); in the “circle of the gift” of Lewis Hyde (27); in the poetic biophilosophy of “Biogea” developed by Michel Serres (28); and in the expanded understanding of art of Joseph Beuys, who developed an artistic expression that stems from the recognition and liberation of our own aliveness. (29, 30)

Science as a practice of empathy

“What the soft chirping of crickets is to us in the fall, we are to trees as they are to rocks and mountains.” — Gary Snyder

The scientific community faces a crucial challenge today: reshaping the relationship between humanity and the rest of creation. Climate change has demonstrated how indispensable scientific methods are in the search for new ecological standards, and these methods have shown us our interconnectedness with nature, even when we ourselves believed otherwise.

So far, the pursuit of more and better scientific techniques to solve all the open questions has proven futile. There are structural limits to what we can “know”—reality is not a closed system. We are abandoning the idea of biology following linear and objective laws like Newtonian physics. In biology, analogous to quantum physics, the researcher is connected to the object he is investigating, although this connection is not quantum but experiential. Both—the researcher and his object—are alive and are connected to each other in an emotional relationship. (9, 14)

If reality cannot be objectified, then a value-free, neutral science is not possible. Our understanding of the world determines how we relate to it and how we change it. So any position that presupposes an objective, timeless, and value-free description of reality or part of it constitutes a violent self-appropriation. Any seemingly neutral and supposedly objective position reinforces invisible structures of power. Knowledge is not objective when it is produced in this way; it is valid mainly in the sense that it stabilizes the system from which it emerged.

Any knowledge is already the implementation of certain standards of our treatment of the world and of our way of acting among ourselves. The task of living together on this planet therefore requires us to be attentive not only to theory but also to scientific practice. When does science merely produce results to satisfy the internal demands of the knowledge industry? When does it legitimize political, economic, or technological interests? We must carefully examine all the materializations of scientific thought and not promote them any more if we are to help science become a greater authority serving the development of life, and if we are to help humanity deepen its knowledge of itself as a continuous self.(30)

In the Anthropocene, each form of science must consciously incorporate its specific values and interests as well as explicitly name them. It must reflect on its inescapable interconnectedness with the world and work creatively on it. Instead of producing only practical knowledge, science should also focus on meaningful orientation and thus on careful observation of the world not from the perspective of a cybernetic system, but also as a network of relationships with the capacity to give birth to life. In this way, a culture of meaningful connection between humans and other creatures can emerge. It can be understood as the art of embodied consciousness, as an ecological “art of life.” 

To the politics of life

“For what else would stones be carved but to prolong human presence and convey a silent message in a lost language: We loved the land, but we could not stay”? — Loren Eiseley, Little Treasures 

In the Anthropocene, sustainability can only be meaningfully understood again through the perspective of “recovery.” To develop truly sustainable behavior, we must earnestly pursue a “culture of aliveness.”(31) Developing a culture of aliveness is an epochal political project. It is a vision of civilization that transcends the everyday crisis management and “escape mentality” of contemporary politics.

Let us call this vision “the politics of life.” The politics of life seeks a civilization in which principles, institutions, and economic practices pursue the maximum of what life should be. Such an ethos cannot be achieved in a short time. It requires a commitment comparable to the struggle for universal human rights that developed over the two centuries after the original idea of the Enlightenment gained traction. Such a time is needed for essential solidarity between all living entities to emerge from strife.

The political program of the Enlightenment was aimed at lifting humanity out of its incapacity through rationality. The politics of life (revitalization) expands this struggle to a more comprehensive goal: to liberate the sentient and creative human from the domination of the ideologies of dead matter, granting him the right not only to rational but also to embodied action and to meaningful experience.

The politics of life preserves the essential values of the Enlightenment—such as the dignity of the individual, justice, and equality—but reconnects them to their roots in the shared creativity of all living things. It does not replace rationality with life, but understands the politics of life as an effort to develop a culture that is aware of, and responsible for, the potential imaginative aliveness in all living things.

The politics of life seeks alternatives to the dogma of growth and the addiction to consumerism. It does not seek technological control, but creative negotiation between equal participants in an ecosystem that everyone needs to preserve. It seeks to foster the experience of aliveness. It creates economic productivity through ecological stability and meaningful activity.(32)

The policy of life strives for the following:

• About global organic agriculture, which secures its yields by strengthening biodiversity and human existential experiences (meaning and joy); about agriculture that integrates and does not separate.
• An economy that does not support the "consumption" of resources in a "market" built on "objectivity" and separation, but an economy that expands the possibilities of participation in a jointly shared planetary metabolism of an economy of commons that understands economic exchange as a joint sharing of the household of the biosphere.
• About a culture that no longer operates according to the model of a private economy focused on profit, but about a culture that participates in a co-creative process of creation.
• About a biology that understands organisms not only as providers of ecosystem services and molecular assembly boxes, but also as creative entities, and that views us humans as a metabolic part of the biosphere, inextricably linked to life and feeling. 
• About the education they teach the art of living and the art of connecting; which is not guided only by the standard of abstract knowledge, functionalist technology and the idea of a "dead world"; and which reduces evaluations and judgments.  
• About a policy that understands regional administrative entities as self-organizing municipalities that are not governed by universal abstract rules and selfish market interests.  
• About a shared existence with other beings in accordance with the South American ethos of creation “Buen Vivir” or the idea of “conviviality” of Caille et al., i.e. about the co-existence of existence with all beings.(33, 34) 
• About the regenerative transformation of the cracks and contradictions inherent in any connection, any creation, and life itself, in accordance with the courage to be and the imaginative practice of aliveness, developed with “custom, grace, and style” (Gary Snyder).(18)

The politics of life clearly shows what implicitly keeps us alive and what actively nourishes it; it is pluralistic, dialogic, and mediating. It understands reality as a common good in which all beings participate co-creatively. It takes responsibility for reality and supports us on the journey to ourselves, recognizing that this journey never ends and can only be defined by walking. Only when our new allegiance to all life becomes our cultural aspiration will the Anthropocene truly deserve the label “the time of humanity.” 

Thanks

Warm thanks to Carsten Jasner, Myriam Kentrup and Gerburg Rohde-Dahl for valuable and insightful discussions and for useful suggestions for improving previous versions of the text. Many thanks also go to Celeste Ceguerra, who did her usual excellent text editing of the translations from the original languages. We are also grateful to the reviewers for their valuable suggestions. This work was supported by grants from the foundations Cocreation Foundation for Collaboration and Collective Development, Kairos Foundation and Selbach Foundation for the Environment.

“Glory be to God for all that is speckled—For the sky as bicolored as a piebald cow; For all the pink spots on the bodies of the swimming trout; For the chestnuts freshly fallen, glowing with fire; For the wings of the finches; For the landscape divided into fields—wrinkled, plowed, and fallow; And for all the crafts, their tools, and their order.” — Gerald Manley Hopkins, Imperfect Beauty

Comment:

1. Crutzen, P.J. and E. Stoermer, The 'Anthropocene'. In: Global Change Newsletter 41 (2000), pp. 17–18. 
2. Sepahvand, A., C. Rosol, and K. Klingan, "Introduction". In: Textures of the Anthropocene: Grain Vapor Ray. (ed. Klingan, K., Sepahvand, A., C. Rosol and BM Scherer). MIT Press, Cambridge, 2014, p. 7–42.
3. Kolbert, E., The Sixth Extinction. An Unnatural History. Bloomsbury, New York 2013. 
4. Marris, E., Rambunctious Garden / Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World. Bloomsbury, New York 2013. 
5. Horkheimer, M. and T. W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Verso, New York 1997. 
6. Shellenberger, M. and T. Nordhaus (eds.). Love Your Monsters. Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene. The Breakthrough Institute, Oakland CA, 2011. 
7. Ferrando, F., "Posthumanism, Transhumanism, Antihumanism, Metahumanism, and New Materialisms. Differences and relations". In: Existenz 8, No 2 (Autumn 2013), pp. 26–32. 
8. Crist, E., "On the poverty of our nomenclature". In: Environmental Humanities 3 (2013), p. 129–147.  
9. Weber, A., The Biology of Wonder. Aliveness, Feeling, and the Metamorphosis of Science. New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island BC 2016. 
10. Weber, A. and F.J. Varela, "Life after Kant. Natural purposes and the autopoietic foundations of biological individuality". In: Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 1 (2002), p. 97–125. 
11. Hoffmeyer, J., Biosemiotics: An Examination Into the Signs of Life and the Life of Signs. University of Scranton Press, Scranton PA, 2009. 
12. Deacon, T., Incomplete Nature. How Mind Emerged from Matter. Norton, New York 2012. 
13. Kull, K., Semiosis stems from logical incompatibility in organic nature: why biophysics does not see meaning, while biosemiotics does. Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology [online] (2015) http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pbiomolbio.2015.08.002. 
14. Weber, A., Enlivenment. Towards a Fundamental Shift in the Concepts of Nature, Culture and Politics. Heinrich Böll, Berlin, 2013.  
15. Weber, A., Liveliness. An erotic ecology. Kösel, Munich 2014. 
16. Weber, A., "The Economy of Wastefulness: The Biology of the Commons". In: The Wealth of the Commons: A World beyond Market and State (ed. Bollier, D. and S. Helfrich). Levellers Press, Boston 2012, p. 6-12. 
17. Fromm, E., To Have or To Be. Bloomsbury Academic, New York 2013; in Czech: To Have or to Be? Our Army, Prague 1992.
18. Snyder, G., The Practice of the Wild. Essays. Counterpoint, Berkeley 1990; Czech: Wilderness practice. Maťa and DharmaGaia, Prague 1999.
19. Sen, A., The Idea of Justice. Penguin, London 2010. See also Michaela Široká, Amartya Sen and the Human Development Index (diploma thesis, Faculty of Education, University of South Bohemia in České Budějovice, 2017). The author translates the term “capability approach” into Czech: “skopnostní přístup”; Vladimír Kališ in his diploma thesis The theory of social liberalism and the possibility of its application in the Czech Republic (University of West Bohemia in Pilsen 2012) this term translates as: "concept of real possibilities".
20. Nussbaum, M., Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2013. 
21. Max-Neef, M. and P. Ekins (eds.), Real Life Economics: Understanding Wealth Creation. Routledge, London 1992. 
22. Camus, A., The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt. Vintage, London 1992; in Czech: A revolting person. Czech writer, Prague 1995; the term “pensée midi” is translated here as “midday thinking”. See also Jacques Chabot, Albert Camus, la pensée de midi. Ecrivains du Sud 2002. 
23. Bollier, D. and S. Helfrich (eds.), The Wealth of the Commons: A World beyond Market and State. Levellers Press, Boston 2012. See also: Silke Helfrich, “The Commons or What We All Live On”. In: Prostor 97-98 magazine  / April 2012, pp. 91-102; Johannes Heimrath, “Community as the Essence of Democracy or Reflections on the Possible Form of Society after Collapse”. In: Prostor 97-98 magazine  / April 2012, pp. 103-109. 
24. Bollier, D., Think like a Commoner. A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons. New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island BC 2014. 
25. Ostrom, E., Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2015. 
26. Morin, E., La méthode: Tome 5, L'identité humaine, l'humanité de l'humanité. Seuil, Paris 2001. 
27. Hyde, L., The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World. Vintage, London 2007. 
28. Serres, M. Biogea. Univocal, Minneapolis 2012. 
29. Beuys, J. In: Art in political struggle (ed. Joachimides, CM). Schäfer, Hannover 1973, p. 74–81. 
30. Kurt, H. and S. Sacks, Die rote Blume. Ästhetische Praxis in Zeiten des Wandels. thinkOya, Klein Jasedow 2013. 
31. Weber, A. and H. Kurt, Lebendigkeit sei! Für eine Politik des Lebens. Ein Manifesto für das Anthropozän. thinkOYA, Klein Jasedow 2015. 
32. Weber, A., "Reality as Commons / A Poetics of Participation for the Anthropocene". In Patterns of Commoning (ed. Bollier, D et al.). Lewellers, Boston 2015, pp. 354–372. 
33. Escobar, A., "Commons in the Pluriverse". In Patterns of Commoning (ed. Bollier, D et al.). Lewellers, Boston 2015, p. 334–345. 
34. Caillé, A., Manifesto Convivialiste. Declaration of Interdependence. Le Bord de L'Eau, Lormont 2013.