This landscape is mysterious and powerful: the in-here landscape of affect/sensation/emotion, thought & image, impulse & intention, affiliation and enmity, embrace and replusion. Its a landscape of aesthetic-emotional-affective **forces**.
Meditative traditions call this the **heart-mind**, and place it in a (superior) relationship with the intellectual mind (which figures large in the cultural landscape). Sometimes aesthetic landcape is called *structure of feeling* in a community or a tradition. In times of trouble and confusion or exhilaration, aesthetic landscape can be *‘the moral economy of the crowd’*: not necessarily to be trusted (although often worshipped and cultivated by activists as 'authentic'), but a force to be reckoned with.
Aesthetic landscape is fluid, a constant tide, oceanic currents. The first nine-tenths of it - the first 500ms of response - are in the preconscious. We surf in the surface of the small window of conscious awareness where intention is set, and moves into enactment; or is re-framed, and moves into some different register or tendency. This is where the rubber hits the road. > Oops mixed metaphor. Perhaps surfing is the better one. It pairs nicely with the dance/choreography metaphor of the cultural landscape.
The aesthetic-affective landscape §3
This landscape - and skill and vision and ability to navigate and surf in it - is central for the activist for two reasons.
First, she needs to be highly literate with her own perception and response in this landscape . . where her attention goes and how it comes out in intention and affiliation . . How we are swept along by the tides of Others’ emotions. Passions are fine - we all need a motor - but not to be trusted too much. Equanimity, respect for 'suchness' of things, ‘pluriversal’ perspective, and the tempering/ moderating/suspending of triggered or habitual response ('What fires together, wires together') are harder, take years to cultivate. Old heads on young shoulders would be good? Easier said than done! But it's an aspiration.
Second, the heart-mind landscape of Others is where activist actions pivot. If practices (and institutions and activist formations) are to be durably re-made, activists must facilitate the re-making of, for example . . the memes that folks get hooked on, the appetites we indulge, the Selfing and Othering we habitually do. And especially: the buttons we’re willing to push, when push comes to shove. Democracy, or the tyranny of structurelessness?
The aesthetic landscape is the basis for one of the zones of reach: Zone ¿1 - In-here (care work)