“Anything Jasun Horsley writes compels me to an uncanny degree; the stakes feel enormous. He exemplifies a mind grappling to the very edge of itself and to the edge of collective human experience simultaneously. Language, in his hands, seems pressured into use as spacecraft into unknown territory.”
~Jonathan Lethem, author of Chronic City
Auticulture is an ongoing exploration of liminality and the interface between the human psyche, society, and culture. My primary focus is on connecting to others on a similar quest for meaning, sharing data and deepening our shared experience of reality.
The specifics typically (if non-volitionally) involve some of the more problematic and contentious (non-consensual) aspects of culture, society, and human existence, aspects such as spirituality, organized child sexual abuse, psycho-social & cultural engineering, parapolitics, trauma, autism, transgender & identity politics, and occultism.
“Encountering myself wandering in your labyrinth before it was even constructed has been disconcerting, unnerving—-a plunge into the state of mise en abym, even—-and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. . .”
~Jonathan Lethem, afterword to Seen & Not Seen
What is Auticulture?
Like everything else in my life and output, the meaning is constantly shifting and mutating in unexpected ways. This is how I originally meant it:
Auto: meaning “self,” “same,” “spontaneous,” e.g. autonomous.
Culture: a particular stage of civilization; development or improvement of the mind by education or training; the behaviors and beliefs characteristic of a particular group; the sum total of ways of living transmitted from one generation to another; the cultivation of microorganisms
The term auticulture is a deliberate oxymoron, because culture entails a collective body (developing over time) where auto signifies an individual self acting spontaneously (or even self-as-spontaneous action?). The autos (micro-organism) which cannot shape itself to match the dominant culture must create its own culture in order to survive, and flourish. In a word, auticulture.
However, in 2018, as identity politics completely and irrevocably jumped the shark, I realized that the term auticulture might also be a sort of prophetic diagnosis, a culture overrun with autodidacts, autocrats and ideologues, in which every-wo-man is an island unto zhe-self.
Not the way I meant it, but that’s OK, I am a diagnostician who loves paradoxes.