DOUGALD HINE

Author: Dougald Hine

  • The Crossing of Two Lines

    The Crossing of Two Lines

    The walls of the house on the Antešić land at Rab were built in the last years of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, but three generations would go by, and two wars, before it came to have a roof. They were a metre thick, those walls, made of local stone, the openings in places no architect would think to put them. It was the brothers Stjepan and Mile Antešić who began the building. On the island, the family grew olives and grapes, but what paid for the construction was the money Stjepan sent back from his work as a ship’s captain on the Danube.

    War came and the building stopped. Stjepan joined the Partisans, fought against the occupying forces and the homebred Catholic fascism of the Ustaša, a stand that lived on in the lifelong anti-clericalism of his daughter, Dorica. It was her daughter, Milica, who married Alojz Brečević, a ship’s mechanic. They had met in Sweden, as migrant workers, and they started a family there, a family that would travel back each summer to help with the wine-making. Don’t get too used to this country, they told their son, each autumn: one of these years, we are going back for good.

    That promise was severed by the new war of the 1990s and it was not until 1997 that Robert Brečević returned, alone, on a bus from Munich. Later, he and his wife, Geska, would come to visit the family land at Rab and — together with his stonemason cousin, Đani — take on the task of finishing what Stjepan and Mile had begun a lifetime earlier.

    A black oak tree hides the stone house from the road. What can be seen is the small chapel, built the same year that the roof went on the house. In the evening, visitors come from around the island — families, old people, young couples out for a walk—to peek through the keyhole and, as if at a fairground peepshow, catch a glimpse of the moving figure of St Christopher carrying the child who will turn out to be Christ. The patron saint of the town of Rab, but also the protector of travellers, his presence is, among other things, a reminder of the journeys that went into the building of this house.

    * * *

    ‘So when did Robert convert?’

    The question came from a mutual friend who had heard that I was writing about the turn in the work of Performing Pictures that led to the projects documented in this book. More often, such questions are left politely unspoken, but they hang in the gallery air when this work is shown.

    We are used to art that employs the symbols of religion in ways seemingly intended to unsettle or provoke many of those to whom these symbols matter; yet to the consumers of contemporary art, those who actually visit galleries, it is more uncomfortable to be confronted with work in which such symbols are used without the frame of provocation. The viewer hesitates between two anxieties: is there something here that I am missing — an irony, a political message, a joke — or is this a piece of propaganda on behalf of the believers? (Whatever they may believe, the evening visitors to the chapel at Rab show no sign of such anxieties.)

    The turn is striking, certainly. There is nothing in the work of Performing Pictures prior to 2009 that would lead the viewer to expect the saints and shrines and altars we find here. The story behind such a turn deserves exploration. Yet if we want to trace the routes that led to this work, I suggest that the question of personal belief will prove misleading: it will not bring us closer to an understanding of what took place, and it may lead us to overlook those clues that have been left along the way.

    * * *

    Geska Helena Andersson was born into a family of small farmers in Skåne, the southernmost region of Sweden. Her parents’ life was anchored to the land — she was thirty before they had a holiday together — though the family had been migrant workers, too, in times when the farm alone could not support them. Her grandmother cycled half the length of Sweden, in those times, picking crops.

    These family stories weave into the work of Performing Pictures. Indeed, the presence of the family, within the production process and the work itself, is one thread that connects the projects here to earlier works such as Kids On The Slide and Fathers and Sons, Verging. That young man standing on a Polish beach is Cesar, the boy who took his bucket and spade to the graveyard in Kids On The Slide; now, he and his father are ready to cycle to the Adriatic, installing roadside chapels along their route. Under a parasol on a Mexican hillside where the Virgin of Guadalupe is about to appear, you can make out Katja, four months old, in the arms of one of the women from the Zegache workshop. Đani Brečević, the stonemason, stares past the camera from under the brim of his hat, fixing the cross to the roof of the St Martin chapel in his home village; then there he is again, cigarette hanging from his mouth, looking hardly less at home as he lays bricks for the St Anne chapel in Zegache.

    The presence of family is felt in other ways: not least, there is the image of St Anne, a mother teaching her daughter to read. Those placing votive candles before it in the Église Notre-Dame de Bon Secours do not know this, but the St Christopher of Movement no. 6: To Carry a Child is also a family portrait: the saint is played by David Cuartielles; the child, who weighs on his shoulders more heavily than if he carried the world, is his young daughter. On a ledge in the door of the shrine, where people might leave images or scribbled prayers, Robert has placed a photograph of his father as a young man on the deck of a ship.

    There is a movement outwards from the earlier work, in which the children themselves were often the subject, to the community and the village. Yet it would be a mistake to see this as a move away from the family or from the domestic; rather, the implications of these themes now reach wider and deeper. The name of the village of Brečevići, site of the St Martin chapel, is only the most obvious clue to this.

    * * *

    The sound of the mariachi trumpets goes up into the arches of the church and lingers there. When the service is over, the mourners follow the band through the streets of this dusty town. At the graveside, among the flowers, a video camera stands on a tripod. The band falls silent, the priest says a prayer, the coffin is lowered into the ground. Three of the dead man’s brothers are away, working in the United States, and it is for them that the burial is being filmed.

    When John Berger and Jean Mohr made a book about the experience of a migrant worker in Europe, nearly forty years ago, they called it A Seventh Man: in Germany and in Britain, at that time, one in every seven manual workers was an immigrant. Today, one in every three Mexicans lives outside of Mexico, the great majority as migrant workers in the United States. This epic displacement forms the background to life in a village such as Santa Ana Zegache, where the painter Rodolfo Morales founded the community workshops in 1997 as a project to restore the Baroque church, but also to restore life to the local economy, training young women in the crafts required for the restoration of its eighteenth-century altarpieces. Robert and Geska came to visit the workshops in 2008, and it was during a conversation that day that the idea of putting the saints into motion first surfaced, almost as a joke, but a joke that caught everyone’s imagination. Here, in a place where most of the young men are far away, working the land north of the border, you find the point of departure of this work.

    In 2011, A Seventh Man was published for the first time in a Mexican edition. Its account of the experience of Gastarbeiters in 1970’s Europe, men of Alojz Brečević’s generation, continues to make sense of the lives of migrant workers on whose labour the economies of the rich countries continue to depend. Berger returned to the subject of migration in a later book, and our faces, my heart, brief as photos. ‘Never before our time have so many people been uprooted,’ he writes. ‘The displacement, the homelessness, the abandonment lived by a migrant is the extreme form of a more general and widespread experience.’

    To speak about such homelessness, to acknowledge the loss that it involves, it is necessary to speak about ‘home’, and this is made difficult by the ideological uses to which that word has been put. The language of home is used by those who would stir up hatred against the immigrant worker and also by those who would undo the ongoing transformation of possibilities experienced by women over the past half-century. These toxic associations can hardly go unacknowledged, yet it may be possible to reach behind them, and with this aim, Berger draws on the comparative studies of religion made by Mircea Eliade.

    In traditional societies, Eliade observes, home is the place from which the world makes sense. This is possible because it stands at the crossing point of two axes: the vertical line, along which one is connected to the world of the gods and the world of the dead, and the horizontal line, which stands for all the journeys that might be made within this world. (If such a cosmology seems remote from our own experience, consider these axes to stand, among other things, for two sets of relations: to those who went before and may come after us, and to those of our own time.) Emigration may be prompted by hope as well as desperation, Berger recognises: it may represent an escape or a dream, but its price includes the dismantling of this centre of the world.

    And yet, somehow, this loss is not the end of the matter: ‘the very sense of loss keeps alive an expectation.’ The substitute home which the migrant finds—and here, again, the migrant experience is an extreme version of the common experience of modernity — is no longer secured to a physical space. ‘The roof over the head, the four walls, have become, as it were, secular: independent from whatever is kept in the heart and is sacred.’

    Nevertheless, by turning in circles the displaced preserve their identity and improvise a shelter. Built of what? Of habits, I think, of the raw material of repetition, turned into a shelter.

    On that first visit to Mexico, what impressed Robert was people’s ‘way of making a home in something which is totally temporary.’ The images which go up on the wall, the figures, the habits and repetitions that go with them were familiar, not only from the Catholic prayer cards at his grandmother’s home in Brečevići, but also from the ornaments of the household in which he grew up, the little figurines, the flowers and images with lace around them. Misunderstood as kitsch, dismissed or ironically celebrated, these secular altars are also a means of making a home, another form of the ‘popular ingenuity’ by which the displaced continue to improvise meaning. Out of this recognition, the idea of working with shrines took hold.

    * * *

    As a child in rural Sweden, Geska remembers, anything ‘shop-bought’ had an aura: shop-bought biscuits, shop-bought meatballs, these were the things you pleaded with your parents to have, and the very fact of coming from a shop gave them glamour. Later, living away from home for the first time, it struck her how upside-down that childhood perception had been. Yet the idea that the supermarket version of anything was special, rather than just taken for granted, hints at the tail-end of another world, a world that still centred on the home-made.

    All creation stories involve a prising apart of the preexistent. The sky is lifted from the waters, light split out of dark, time from space, and the world as we know it roars into being. The industrial world, the social, economic, technological, political and material realities within which the unprecedented uprooting, the great gains and the seldom fully acknowledged losses of modernity have taken place, began with such a fission: the prising apart of production from consumption, which took concrete form in the new separation of work from home.

    The history of the industrial revolution is a history of massive resistance on the part of ordinary people. This resistance fell into two phases: in the first, it was an attempt to defend a way of living; in the second, which began when this way of living had largely been destroyed, it became an attempt to negotiate better conditions within the new world made by the destroyers. What had been lost was a way of living in which most production took place on a domestic scale, interwoven with the lives of families and communities. Work was hard, but it varied with the seasons and required skill and judgement. Many of the basic needs of a household could be met by its own members or their immediate neighbours, not least through access to common land, so that people were not entirely exposed to the mercilessness of the market.

    It is not necessary to romanticise the realities of pre-industrial society: the intensity and duration of the struggle which accompanied its passing are evidence enough. (In 1812, at one of the high-watermarks of this struggle, the British government deployed 12,000 troops against the Luddites in four counties of England, more than Wellington had under his command that year in the ongoing war against Napoleon.) The relationship between this first phase of resistance and the labour movement that would arise out of its defeat has most often been presented as a progressive development: the dawning of a new political consciousness, and with it new forms of organisation and effective action. Yet it was also an accommodation to what had previously been fought against: the new division of the world between the space of work, dedicated to the sole purpose of maximising production, and the domestic space, now dedicated to reproduction and consumption. The sentimental idealisation of the home as a woman’s sphere originates in this division, as established in Victorian England. Behind this advertising hoarding lay the real transformation of the home from a living centre of activity to a dormitory, a garage in which the worker is parked when not in use.

    Yet even such a transformation, so elemental that we hardly perceive it, can never be the whole story. In the words of Eugenio Montale:

    History isn’t
    the devastating bulldozer they say it is.
    It leaves underpasses, crypts, holes
    and hiding places.

    The memory of the seasonal return to help with the wine-making, the memory of the shininess of anything shop-bought, these are fragments that have survived the bulldozer, clues to another way of living. More widely, the older rhythms of working life survive in certain historical underpasses, as E. P. Thompson notes in his essay on ‘Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism’:

    The pattern persists among some self-employed—artists, writers, small farmers, and perhaps also with students—today, and provokes the question whether it is not a “natural” human work-rhythm.

    In this respect, the practice of Performing Pictures is hardly exceptional — how many artists could draw a line between work and life? — but certain elements, in particular the involvement of the whole family in the work, resonate strongly with the world whose memory remained alive in their own childhoods, a memory which still finds echoes in the places where this work was made.

    * * *

    A priest is fetched to bless the chapel. He comes from two villages away. The proper words and gestures are performed. Yet it would be a mistake to assume that these stones were cut and carved, the door made, the animation shot or the screen rigged to the solar panel, either for or on behalf of the institution which he represents.

    ‘We have become fascinated,’ Robert writes, ‘by those rural chapels to be found outside of the control of the churches, the patrons and urban plans.’ A series of photographs shows small capillas at the corners of cactus-fenced yards in the lanes around Zegache. Improvised out of industrial materials, concrete and rusting corrugated iron, with shop-bought figures, a virgin studded with LEDs, a vase of drying flowers, these unofficial shrines are also expressions of popular ingenuity. Sometimes, nature adds its own contribution: a spider has caught Christ in a net that funnels into a silk vortex in the gap between body and cross, like an opening to another universe.

    Looking through them, I remember another set of photographs, taken by the British artist Rachel Horne in the South Yorkshire coalfield where four generations of her family worked as miners. Many of the former colliery sites have been grassed over, the slag-heaps topped off with public artworks. In Horne’s photos, these sculptures seem to have landed from nowhere, unaware of the pride, the conflict and the loss that these sites represent. They are asking to be vandalised, and, in one case, this has already happened, the stone structure toppled like a children’s toy and a stencil sprayed onto an exposed face.

    Modern public art has its beginnings in the assumption by the secular state of a symbolic power which had formerly been exercised by the church. Yet the contrast between those commissioned memorials and the improvised sites of devotion around Zegache suggests the limitations of official art. The capillas are cared for by small fraternities which take responsibility for their upkeep. The shrine as physical object is held within a web of mutuality which lends it a certain resilience, beyond the properties of the material itself. A similar principle applies to the chapels in this book.

    ‘As media artists,’ Geska points out, ‘you’re not invited to do public space installations, because it’s not something that’s stable, and there’s the electricity, and everyone knows that the technology is going to break within three years.’ The idea for the Chapel of St Anne grew out of the previous collaborations with artisans at the Zegache community workshops, although it required the support of the local mayor to go ahead. In Brečevići, it was a group of villagers who proposed the St Martin chapel and provided the materials. ‘If the screen breaks, there is someone who will make sure it’s mended.’

    The thing that redeems this fragile work from being a future piece of junk is its embedding within a community of people to whom it matters. The tasks of maintenance that would have been a line to be cut in a public budget become, instead, part of the rhythm of life for those around the work; or, seen from another angle, this activity becomes part of the work, as in the Maintenance Art of Mierle Laderman Ukeles. The connection is significant: few artists have addressed so directly the schism between home and work. As Ukeles writes of her younger self, ‘She was looking to sew back together a great fabric that she saw rended, torn apart.’ Except that in this case, the context is not the museum — literally, ‘the shrine of the muses’, home to the cult of art — but the vernacular Catholicism of those for whom this work becomes part of their venerative practice.

    * * *

    The discomfort with work that appears to be an expression of religious faith and the polite avoidance of putting the direct question about the artists’ beliefs are both symptoms of the modern doctrine that religion belongs to the private sphere. Within the boundaries of one’s own home, there is complete freedom of belief, but to bring one’s belief into the public sphere is to threaten the stability of the secular order which guarantees this freedom.

    As Robert observes, today’s Sweden has become the kind of radically secular society that the ideologically atheist states of the former Eastern Bloc proclaimed without achieving. In such a society, religion becomes countercultural: to experience and express a religious faith as something stronger than a personal opinion is to put yourself at odds with the background assumptions of the world around you. The forms of religion that emerge in such a society reflect this: faith becomes a conscious foreground statement.

    Yet in much of the world — in rural Oaxaca, and even in rural Croatia, despite a generation of official atheism, and despite the toxic entanglement of Catholicism and nationalism — religion remains part of the social background. If one person has more time for the church than another, this is a matter of inclination, rather than a charged personal dilemma. It was in this world that Performing Pictures began making venerative objects. The experience they reflect is not so dramatic as the language of conversion would suggest, neither as personal in its intensity nor as universal in its implications. More like the experience of coming home.

    * * *

    When work began again on the house at Rab, its stone and timber construction must have seemed an anachronism; on neighbouring land, a German property speculator was building a set of holiday apartments. Yet it is these which now stand unfinished, ghosts of brick and concrete, abandoned by their owner, who no longer answers correspondence from the municipality. Perhaps, three generations from now, his descendants will return to finish what he began, but as the sun goes down over the Chapel of St Christopher, this seems to stretch our capacity for belief a little further than it will go tonight.

    Published as the introduction to The Crossing of Two Lines, Dougald Hine & Performing Pictures (Elemental Editions). The book also includes four conversations with Geska and Robert Brečević of Performing Pictures and a sequence of twelve poems.

  • Commoning in the City

    Commoning in the City

    In the architecture museum on the island of Skeppsholmen, in the heart of Stockholm, eleven of us have been brought together to spend two days thinking aloud around the theme of Commoning the City. The human rights researcher Saki Bailey provides a forensic analysis of the foundations of property law. The artist Fritz Haeg tells us what happened when he opened his home in Los Angeles to the public as a space for collective learning and collaboration. Alda Sigurðardóttir leads us through a version of the visioning process that was used by the national assembly of citizens, following the economic and political collapse in Iceland. Meanwhile, Fredrik Åslund — the founder of a Swedish think-tank, the name of which translates as Create Commons — has the best t-shirt slogan of the event: ‘Home-cooking is killing the restaurant industry.’

    I am the night watchman on this team, sent in to replace the Swiss author, P.M., the man responsible for the anarchist utopia bolo’bolo, who has had to pull out for family reasons. Taking his place in the open conference that is the centrepiece of the two days, I realise that this is the first time I have spoken in public on the subject of the commons. For most of the others, this is a term that has been at the heart of their work for years or decades. Meanwhile, this event itself is evidence of the new importance that it is taking on: ‘commons’ is becoming a charged word, following a path similar to those taken by words such as ‘sustainability’ and ‘resilience’, raised as a banner under which an increasing variety of people and organisations wish to place themselves.

    At such moments, there can be mixed feelings for those who have a long history with the word in question: there is room for a sense of vindication, but also concern at the new meanings, or new vaguenesses, that accrete to a word as it comes into vogue. As a relative outsider, it is interesting to observe people coming to terms with this, and certain questions arise: not least, why is this happening now?

    Of everything I hear during these two days, the answer that most impresses me comes from Stavros Stavrides: ‘commons’ has become useful, he argues, because of a change in attitude to the state, a disillusionment with the ‘public’ and a need for another term to takes its place. The public sphere, public values, the public sector: all of these things might once have promised some counterweight to the destructive force of the market, but this no longer seems to be the case.

    We are not witnessing a turn towards anarchism, exactly, but something more pragmatic: a shift in the general mood, reflecting the reality of people’s experience after five years of this unending crisis, itself coming after decades of neoliberalism. It is the attitude that underlies the Squares Movement, from Tahrir to Syntagma, the Puerta del Sol and Zuccotti Park. If those camping out in cities across three continents were reluctant to distill their discontent into a set of demands on government, this was not simply a utopian refusal to engage with the compromises of political reality; it was also a conviction that to put hope in government is now the most utopian position of all. This is also the attitude that has driven the rise of Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement, and it has all the uncomfortable ambiguities such an example suggests.

    Into this vacuum, the commons enters as an alternative to both public and private. I find myself wanting to push this further, to suggest that it indicates a significant historical rupture, in at least two senses: a breaking of the frame of politics as a tug of war between the forces of state and market; and the failure of the project of the public, the promise of liberal modernity to construct a neutral space in which we could meet each other as individuals with certain universal rights. This latter point is particularly uncomfortable, we discover during our conversations in Stockholm, since many of our ideas of social justice are founded on that framework. Yet if it is true that the rise of the commons reflects the failure of the public, it is not clear that we can simply expect to borrow its assumptions.

    A politics that has abandoned the public might justly be called a post-modern politics. We have already seen the cynical form of such a politics in the hands of Bush, Blair and Berlusconi: the reliance on controlling the narrative, the disdain for ‘the reality-based community’. Against this, the appeal to older public values looks sadly nostalgic. (Think of Aaron Sorkin’s latest series for HBO, The Newsroom: its opening titles, a montage of a nobler age of American journalism, the series itself offers a kind of liberal wish-fulfilment, while Obama presides over drone wars and assassination lists.) The attraction of the commons, then, may be that it promises the emergence of a non-cynical form of post-modern politics.

    If the commons was to hand as a reference point for such a politics, this was to no small extent the result of the emergence of new modes of collaboration, facilitated by — but not limited to — the internet. A great deal of excitement, some of it well-founded and some of it hype, has centred on the disruption to our forms of property and modes of production being brought by the ways in which people are using networked technologies. It hardly helps that attempts to articulate the genuine possibilities of these technologies are inevitably entangled with the interests of venture capital firms and huge corporations, a libertarian ideology, and a California-inflected mythology about the evolution of human consciousness.

    Apart from anything else, these entanglements obscure the extent to which the most appealing aspects of the internet are often as old as the hills: many of the modes of community and collaboration that have come into being around these technologies are recapitulations of earlier social themes, marginalised by the structure and scale of industrial mass societies.

    One of the defining characteristics of such societies has been the marginalisation of human sociability: domestic space becomes a private sanctum, strangers no longer speak to one another in the street, while there is a compulsion to choose the more profitable and efficient mode of any productive activity over forms whose inefficiencies might allow more room for sociability and meaning within the activity itself. Describing the organisation of activity within cities, the sociologist Ray Oldenburg identified the phenomenon of the ‘third place’: neither the home nor the workplace, but the convivial meeting point — whether pub, cafe or hair salon — whose importance to the life of a local community is out of proportion to the amount of time we get to spend there. Where Oldenburg views this as an eternal feature of human societies, we might recognise the third place as a kind of native reservation: an enclave in which our indigenous sociability exists under license, while the rest of the social landscape is subject to the demand for efficiency.

    Against this, it is striking that the online spaces that inspire greatest attachment seem to be those which have something in common with the campfire, the bazaar, or indeed the commons, and that such pre-industrial social forms have been a recurring reference point within internet culture. These spaces exceed the boundaries of the third place, both in the range of activity taking place within them and the amount of time which many devote to them. Even the structure of the internet itself resembles not so much the ‘information superhighway’ envisaged by politicians in the 1990s as the proliferating web of trade routes that centred on the Silk Road. (The historical analogy is also implicit in the argument made by the information activist Smári McCarthy, that the radical possibilities of these technologies are under threat from ‘the industrialisation of the internet.’)

    There are deep ambiguities here: technologically, the internet represents an intensification of many of the dynamics of the industrial era; yet in the new social spaces that have accompanied it, people have had powerful experiences of what it means to come together, work and build communities under conditions other than those that dominate the real-world communities and workplaces we have inherited from industrial society.

    Whatever else, these ambiguities imply the political nature of such spaces: the new forms of collaboration easily turn into new forms of exploitation — the line between crowdsourcing and unpaid labour is poorly marked — and hence our conversations in Stockholm also touch on the need for new forms of collective organisation.

    The historical commons might suggest another element within the resistance to exploitation and the formation of a new politics. As Ivan Illich and Anthony McCann have argued, historically, the commons was not simply a pool of resources to be managed, but an alternative to seeing the world as made of resources. Specifically, the commons was not something to be exploited for the production of commodities, but something that people could draw on within customary limits to provide for their own subsistence.

    During the generations of enclosure and industrialisation, the meaning of the term ‘subsistence’ was turned upside down: a word which, in its origin, referred to the ability to ‘stand firm’ came to signify weakness instead of strength. In the language of economics, ‘subsistence’ now stands for the barest and most miserable form of human existence. The irony is that this inversion took place just as the means of subsistence were being taken away from the greater part of the population, not least through the enclosure of common lands to which they had previously enjoyed claims of usage.

    To reclaim subsistence as a condition of strength, especially when compared to total dependence on wage labour, is not to confuse it with the fantasy of self-sufficiency that has a particular grip on the American imagination. When Illich speaks of ‘the commons within which people’s subsistence activities are embedded’, he is describing a fabric of social relations, a patchwork of customary law. ‘It was unwritten law,’ he says, ‘not only because people did not care to write it down, but because what it protected was a reality much too complex to fit into paragraphs.’ This is not the radical independence of self-sufficiency, but a kind of mutual dependence that is held together by human relationships, rather than only by the forces of the market.

    Reclaiming the concept of ‘subsistence’ — the ability to stand firm, to meet many of our own needs, without being wholly at the mercy of the market or the state — may be an important piece in the jigsaw of a 21st century politics. If the Pirate Party marks one end of the new politics of the commons, perhaps the other end looks something like the Landless Peasant Party.

    How do we handle it, when words that have mattered to us gather a new momentum and get raised as banners? Of course, I hope that good things will flourish in the name of the commons in the years ahead. At the same time, the experience of many who have worked for the goal of ‘sustainability’ suggests how disorientating such a journey can become. Subsistence is hardly the only example of a word that has come to mean the opposite of what it once did.

    That words fail us is not a mistake, it is in the nature of language. In the plenary session that brings our time on Skeppsholmen to a close, I find myself quoting that passage from Illich about ‘a reality much too complex to fit into paragraphs.’ If what matters most is the part that is hardest to write down, then the challenge is to stay faithful to this: to tack towards the unwritten, rather than setting a straight course towards an approximation. Ultimately, all our language is provisional, an endless reaching towards what we are trying to say.

    Such statements sound close to those made by the kind of theorists of postmodernism whose students often fall into cynicism. Yet the provisional nature of language need not be a source of despair: it can be sufficient to our situation. The trick is to hold our words lightly, to be willing to let them go, for no word needs to be sacred. And as I write this, four weeks after those conversations in Stockholm, it occurs to me that perhaps I am just stumbling towards what P.M. himself would have said to us, had he been able to make the trip from Switzerland.

    Here he is, in an interview from 2004, explaining what led him to the invention of bolo’bolo:

    ‘The original idea for creating this weird secret language came up because the European left-wing terminology was no longer viable. Nowadays when people talk about communism, that’s gulag, no one wants to hear about it. Or if people talk about socialism, then they are speaking of Schröder’s politics — retirement cuts — and no one wants that, either. And all of the other standard left-wing expressions such as “solidarity,” “community,” they’re all contaminated and no longer useful. But the things that they stand for are actually quite good. I don’t want to suffer because of terminology for which I am not to blame; instead, I’d rather create my own. It would probably take longer to explain that the communism that I am talking about is not the one that I saw. It is easier to simply say I am for bolo’bolo, and then everyone starts to think of the things all over again, to re-think them.’

    Published as the cover story of STIR: Issue 2.

  • Dealing With Our Own Shit: A Conversation With Gustavo Esteva

    Dealing With Our Own Shit: A Conversation With Gustavo Esteva

    There were eagles riding the air overhead as we took the backroad out of San Pablo Etla to the Casa Esteva. The taxi driver had left us at the crossroads: at ease in the highspeed free-for-all of the highway, he had no desire to risk his exhaust on the unpaved road ahead, so a young man from one of the neighbouring households drove down to collect us. It was three months into the dry season. We bumped across the bed of an empty stream before climbing again towards the adobe house among the trees.

    After days in downtown Oaxaca, its streets clogged with fumes, the air up here was a release. Twenty-five years earlier, when Gustavo Esteva and his partner left Mexico City to settle here, they must have felt that same contrast. For Gustavo, it was a return to his grandmother’s village: the grandmother who, in his childhood, was not allowed to enter his parents’ house by the front door, nor to speak to her grandson in Zapotec.

    ‘For my mother,’ he told me, ‘the best thing that she could do for her children was to uproot us from any connection with our indigenous ancestry, to avoid the discrimination she had suffered.’

    Despite this, the summers he spent with his grandmother on her stall in the market in Oaxaca planted stories that would come to life much later.

    Meanwhile, as a young man, he took refuge from the cultural confusions of his family in the promise of ‘development’. The term which would frame the relation between the countries of the post-war world, embodying a unifying model of global economic progress on which even Cold War opponents could agree, was first used in its modern sense by President Truman in his inaugural address of 1949. At 15, following his father’s death, Gustavo found work with the first wave of global corporations bringing the reality of development to Mexico. Before too many years had passed, he would become the youngest ever executive for IBM; but instead of taking his place at the centre of this grand narrative of economic progress, he found himself standing on one side, the side of the bosses, being asked to cheat the workers.

    So, in his early 20s, he walked away from that career and before too many years had passed, he had become a Marxist guerrilla. This was the era of Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution: if capitalism could not deliver the promise of economic progress for everyone, it was time to fight for the alternative. Marx would remain a deep influence on his thinking, but this phase of his life ended, again, in disillusionment: he parted with the idea of violent revolution after one of the leaders of his group shot the other in a row over a woman. ‘It was a revelation of the kind of violence we were imposing on ourselves and we wanted to impose on the whole of society.’

    For a second time, he walked away from what had looked like a means of making a better world. In the years that followed, he continued to read, study and write about economics and social change, and before too many years had passed, he had become a senior official in a government agency. By the early 1970s, he was running programmes to control the market in basic staples, providing food security to millions of the urban and rural poor. Yet this phase, too, would end in a decision to walk away, one that would shape the rest of his life.

    In 1976, due to the success of these programmes, he was in line for a ministerial post in the new administration. ‘By that time, I knew at least two things: first, this is not what the people want, these beautiful development programmes. I did not know exactly why or what it is that the people want, but I knew that it was not this. The second was, the logic of government and the logic of the people are completely different. Even this populist president – I was in the presidential house, many times, in cabinet meetings – how they take decisions and what the people need and want are two different planets.’

    I knew the outline of this story, but as we talked on the porch of the house that they had built, what struck me was his willingness to trust in his own uncertainty. At each of the turns in his journey, he had been willing to renounce the security of existing structures, structures he had come to find intolerable, even though he had no answer as to what else could be done. Willing to go and wait in the wilderness, with patience, to see what new things might come into view as a result of that letting go.

    Having walked away from the prospect of high office, he went to work at the grassroots, in the villages and on the urban margins, with peasants newly arrived in the city. He talks about this as a time of happiness and confusion: among those with whom he was now working, those who were supposed to be the underdeveloped, he found what seemed to him a good life. Yet none of this made sense within the frameworks of economics, anthropology, sociology or political science. It was as if he had to choose between the whole theoretical frame of development which had shaped his life and the evidence of the lives of those around him. This was pushing him to a crisis.

    ‘Suddenly I said, one day: I will take off the glasses, the lenses I am using, all the different lenses of development. To abandon those categories, it was like the moment when you come from the darkness into the light, and you are just seeing shadows.’

    Two things, he said, helped him to make sense of his experience. The first were the memories of his grandmother that began to surface again, the stories that she had told him in those childhood summers. Lessons which he had not understood at the time now took on meaning. It was this, he says, that made it possible to connect with the people around him.

    The second was his encounter with Ivan Illich. On the Marxist Left in the early ’70s, in the years of his most famous work, he had been no more than a reactionary priest, not worth reading. His critiques of schooling and health systems were beside the point: of course, in a capitalist system, these things would be bad, but after the revolution we will have good schools!

    When they met in 1983, what struck Gustavo was that the terms of Illich’s thinking made sense in the light of the lives of the peasants and migrants with whom he was working. I had heard this before, but it was brought home to me later that month at a conference in Cuernavaca: after two days of dispiriting academic presentations, the one talk in which Illich’s ideas actually came to life was given by a woman from an indigenous community who had only come across his books a few months earlier.

    It was in Cuernavaca, five years earlier, at a gathering to mark the fifth anniversary of Illich’s death, that I had first met Gustavo. Then, the following year, he came to London and I saw him polarise a room full of social entrepreneurs and young NGO workers with his stories about the paradoxes of development. Somewhere around that time, I began to meet up with a guy called Paul Kingsnorth who had an idea for a journal called Dark Mountain, and it turned out that the one person we knew in common was this old Mexican who called himself a ‘deprofessionalised intellectual’. Paul had interviewed him in Oaxaca, when he was writing about the Zapatistas, and it was Gustavo who gave him the title of his first book, One No, Many Yeses.

    That is not the only way in which Gustavo’s thinking is entangled with the roots of Dark Mountain. The life out of which that thinking has grown is a story of faith in progress, the loss of that faith, and the finding of the kinds of hope which remain on the other side of loss. Then there is the willingness to walk away, even though you have no answers to give when people ask what you would do instead, to walk away with only your uncertainty, rather than to stay with certainties in which you no longer believe. Finally, the distinction he makes between ‘the better life’ promised by universal visions of progress and development, and ‘the good life’, which has to be worked out on a human scale, improvised, in the times and places where we find ourselves.

    The conversation reproduced here was recorded by Nick Stewart as part of a film on which we are collaborating. His is the unspoken presence in what follows: not only because he was moving about with a handheld camera, finding the angles from which to catch our expressions as we talked, but because he then produced the initial transcript on which this text is based.

    DH: It seems to me that ‘development’ begins by talking as if one country is a poor version of another and ends by making that the case: you end up with poor copies of things that were developed in other times and places. It’s not to say that ‘living well’, as you put it, involves a hermetic sealing, keeping out the new. It’s that, if one is starting from the idea that this is something we have to work out here and now, rather than something that is worked out by others on our behalf, that will lead to a kind of questioning of new technologies and new ideas. A dialogue with them, rather than an unquestioning acceptance or demand for them.

    GE: There are two things that I am involved with in your observation.

    One is, we are now forced to put limits to our hospitality, because of hospitality abuses. The people here in this area of the world are very, very hospitable. They open their minds and their hearts and their arms to everything. But then, the occupation of Mexico by the Spaniards started with an abuse of hospitality. Montezuma was hosting Cortez as a great guest and then Cortez took him hostage in his own palace. Well, this kind of hospitality abuse we can see for the last 500 years. All the time, we open our minds and our hearts and our arms, and then something horrible happens. And this can be a person, a country, invading us. Or it can be the Green Revolution, or whatever kind of technology. Then what we are saying, now? It’s not closing ourselves, no, but let’s be careful. We cannot be so hospitable to anything that comes. We need to first examine what is coming and then define if we want it or not. That is being careful, particularly about these technologies.

    But there is another point in your observation: for many years we accepted that something like poverty or underdevelopment was objective. We were underdeveloped. There were ‘the poor’, as something very clear. And then, after years, we discovered that poverty is just a comparison. ‘These people are poor because they don’t have what we have!’ Because they lack the family car or the college degree, or the beautiful house, or a certain kind of shoes, or iPod, or whatever…

    DH: All of which become the markers on this scale of ‘the better life’, as you tick off one after another, reaching upwards, hoping that somewhere up there it’s going to get less lonely than it seems to have become along the way.

    GE: But if you are seeing the people by what they don’t have, then you are not seeing them.

    That is the problem with ‘poverty’. Who are really the poor? One thing the anthropologists are all the time asking themselves is: why are the people in these very poor villages laughing so much, celebrating life so much? They should be very sad, because they are so poor. They are not so sad. Let’s try to see them for what they are, who they are. Not just comparing them: oh, they don’t have this or have that.

    DH: I think this is where some of the fear comes from now in what I have come to think of as the ‘undeveloping countries’ of the postindustrial West. There’s an assumption, which comes from this scale of development, that what we have had in Britain or America is the better life. Given that, for many people, it’s actually quite a disorienting, stressful life, imagine how much worse it must be once you go further down that scale! We must at all costs prevent any kind of falling down, even if it means we have to sacrifice more and more of the things that we used to think were part of the deal for us. So the deal keeps getting worse, but we have to keep working the longer hours and retiring later, and so on, because the alternative is to fall into this hell of poverty which is projected onto the lives of most of the people on the planet.

    Part of what I’ve been wondering about, as I think about this phenomenon of undevelopment, is how people find the clues that it might not work out like that. That, in the process of losing many of the things that people like me grew up taking for granted, we might catch some of the threads that we dropped further back in time, find new ways of picking them up. Becoming part of the world again.

    GE: Some friends of mine from Italy and Spain have been telling me with great concern that now the people on the streets are very, very conservative. They are there to conserve what they still have. And it’s a legitimate concern, of course: they had jobs yesterday, then they want the job back. But this implies that there is something worse than being exploited: not being exploited. I want my chains back! I want to be exploited again! We cannot see that way, we are seeing only the loss.

    I would say the most important point for me, in this kind of conversation is, first, let’s be brave enough to see the horror in which we are today. It’s a real horror. We must not qualify it, it is a horror. We are destroying everything. The idea of trying to keep, only to keep, what we have today in the world: this is to continue the destruction on a bigger scale. And because we are in that condition, and because the people are reacting to that condition, the powers-that-be are reacting in a horrible way. And that means you are seeing a lot of violence, a lot of control of the population and many terrible things.

    So first, we need to be aware of the horror, and not just falling into a kind of apocalyptic randiness and saying, December 21st will be the end of the world. It is really discovering in our own societies, in our own beings, every one of us, the elements of that horror.

    And then, in that same observation, discovering the absolute irrationality of our desires: how we define our wants, what kind of definitions of the good things we have. If we begin the reflection of ‘What is it that I really want?’ Not what the market is telling me to want, not what the state is telling me. What is it that I really want? Then we start saying, ‘Oh, I want love!’ I want a very close relation with someone, I want to laugh all the time or I want to cry all the time…

    DH: ‘I want to not be constantly feeling precarious.’ I think that’s one of the deep desires in the undeveloping countries: the sense of precarity that affects most of the population, now.

    GE: This is a very important point. I know that this word is now used more than ever. Precarity. And the immediate reaction, a conditioned reflex, is: the institutions can offer me protection from precarity.

    DH: Yes. There’s a kind of yearning for a return of the social democratic golden age. I sometimes talk about the fantasy of the social democratic End of History, which afflicts many people on the left in Europe. That, if it wasn’t for these neoliberals coming along, then we could have had social democracy for everyone, forever. And it’s as historically illiterate as the Fukuyama ‘End of History’ fantasy. It’s the same thing, albeit in a kinder form. So, yes: what’s the alternative? Rather than imagining that we can rebuild the social democratic institutional support that kept people for a while from a sense of precarity in the West, where else do we look?

    GE: We have reached the point in which the institutions, in every country, cannot offer us any sense of stability and the elimination of precarity. It is, I think, a fact that no country will be able to pay the bills of education and health and pensions. It is useless to continue the discussion about that kind of thing. Of course, we need some institutions, and, of course, we need some operation of these institutions to keep the society going. I’m not saying dismantle all the institutions tomorrow morning and that’s it.

    But if you want to abandon that feeling of precarity, then it’s to rediscover that the only way to have a kind of security is at the grassroots. With your friends. With the kinds of new commons emerging everywhere. Then, together, the people themselves, with their neighbours, we can create the kind of social fabric that can really offer us security, protection and a good life. The possibility of living well.

    DH: For that to work, there has to be a rediscovery of a ‘self’ which is not the self that economics has taught us we have. Part of what I see is that the nightmares that are haunting the West now are nightmares which economics has projected onto history. I just began to read this novel for teenagers, The Hunger Games, which is set in a dark future America. In the first few pages, I couldn’t get past the sense that I was reading another of the kinds of fables that economists use. It was another Robinson Crusoe story. It was a story in which all of the characters are atomised individuals – and in which this has intensified as people have got poorer. Which bears no clear relation to how people do continue to make life work during difficult times. The qualities of the highly-individualised self that this book starts out with are precisely the qualities that emerge among people who are able to use money to solve all of their problems.

    To me, I think that is one of the greatest challenges to the emergence of a new commons taking root within countries like mine: people have bought into so much of what they’ve been told to believe about themselves. Even what we think we know about science and evolution, so much of it is entangled with projections of these economic stories about the competing lone individual. How does that begin to break down? Where do new-old concepts of the self begin to emerge?

    GE: I think that this is already happening, because people have had enough of this hyper-individualism. And the good news is that, we have been constructed as individuals, we can feel that we are individuals, we can experience the world as individuals – but we are not! As Raimon Panikkar said very clearly, we are ‘knots in nets of relations’. This is what people are rediscovering, that we are really the relations. That behind this individual mask, the mask of ‘I am a mammal and this body is the body of animal, an individual body, a unique individual body’, behind this, what I find is an ‘I’ that is always a ‘we’. Because I am a collection of relations, my story of relations, my relations with other people. It is important to see how we have been constructed as individuals in order to abandon that idea.

    I have been using one example. I don’t think that in Europe it is so famous, this book of Dr. Spock that is basically prepared for young couples who don’t know how to raise a child. It has a magnificent index about how to discover anything happening to the baby. For five years, the book has the catechism, the commandments for the young couple. First commandment: the parents’ bed is forbidden territory for the babies. They should never be there. Second commandment: it is very good, it’s really necessary, for the child to be alone in his or her own room as soon as possible. If possible, the day they come back from the hospital. Third commandment: it is very good for the physical and mental development and psychological development of the child to cry alone, at least half an hour a day. I imagine at some point the poor mother saying, ‘Oh god! Twenty minutes…Twenty-five minutes…I cannot bear this suffering of my poor child!’

    Well, what kind of being is this baby? The very first day he is in the house, he’s being raised as an individual. Then you go to India, you go to Mexico and you see that fantastic invention of the shawl, the rebozo, in which the baby is attached to the body of the mother for months. But the mother is doing many things, is doing her own life with the baby, here, on her breast, close. That is a different kind of relation.

    DH: In a sense, this is my question, because what we see in the West are generations of people who have been brought up according to one set of experts or another who are essentially guiding the formation of the atomised individual from the moment of arrival back from the hospital. That damage is inscribed into the adults. I often think that the subject that’s assumed by economics, Homo economicus, is actually the damaged child. The assumption of scarcity in every situation, that’s the behaviour of a child that has not had love and not been able to trust in early childhood. And this is normalised as what we are all meant to be like, what the marketers are teaching their students in marketing to manipulate.

    So, how do we go from societies like Britain or Sweden or the United States, where most adults have had an upbringing that was calculated to produce the atomised individual? How do those atomised individuals re-learn the belonging within the larger we?

    GE: I think it is happening, it is really happening. Millions of people are desperately looking for an alternative.

    DH: There’s a hunger, certainly. There is a gap between what we’re told we are and what we feel we are. Often people don’t have a language for it, all they have is the sense that something’s not right. A sense that there’s meant to be more to life than this. Sometimes they’re then told: well, the sense that there’s meant to be more to life, this is a universal experience. ‘This is what life is. Life is the feeling that there ought to be more to life.’

    But, there is … an opening. That gap is the place through which, when people then find things which help them make sense of their experience and don’t simply accept that sense of lack, there is a coming-alive that you see in them. I’ve certainly experienced that a lot in the work that I’ve been part of in Europe over the last few years.

    Again, though, I come back to the anxiety which I think a lot of us feel: ‘But this is so small!’ This is little cracks in the corners, against the vastness of the ideology and the structures that exist to tell us that this, the horror as you call it, is all that there is or could be.

    GE: That is why it is important to discover that we are not alone. We don’t see in the news the examples of people reclaiming the commons. From Peru, we did not hear that the indigenous people reclaimed one million hectares, one by one. One million hectares is a lot of land. Now they are producing 40% of their food in Peru within their own traditional system. That is reclaiming the commons.

    But the most important thing, I think, for people in Europe is creating new commons. It is the people, particularly in the cities…We know we all have a thousand ‘friends,’ but real friends we have only two, three, four or five, perhaps eight friends. Here, I remember Illich again, he was talking all the time about his polyphilia, that was his thing, the need to be with friends. He elevated friendship as the main category for the reorganisation of the society, for reconstructing our society in a different way.

    DH: The starting point of hope.

    GE: Absolutely.

    DH: I encounter a lot of people who are alive to the seriousness of the mess we’re in, alive to the horror, and who can’t put their faith in something as soft as friendship. Who say, ‘Our cities are three meals away from catastrophe because of the agro-industrial supply chain.’ Who say, ‘We’re looking at the climate predictions and, you know, we’re going to be lucky if we keep climate change down to four degrees by the end of the century. There’s a good chance it will be six. We will probably have, at best, half a billion people left on the planet at the end of the century.’ Many of the people I work closely with, this is the reality that is weighing on their minds, and it is very hard to…

    GE: It is their reality? That is the problem.

    DH: This is what they would say is the hard reality that we face. And it is very hard for them to hear what we are talking about, when we talk about friendship as the new commons, as the ground from which things grow. What do you say to them?

    GE: How can we formulate the problems, the reality in a different way?

    What I see in global warming, and the other horrors, this is a formulation that implies the continuation of the manic obsession of industrial man to be God. And, he failed. We are not gods.

    To put this in a provocative way: it is, I would say, equally arrogant to affirm or deny global warming. In both cases, we pretend that we really know how the Earth is behaving. That we have all the information. First, that we know from the past how the Earth behaves. Second, that we know how the Earth will react. And third, that we know how to fix the problem.

    That is too arrogant. To say, yes, there is global warming, or to say, no, there is no global warming: both positions are absolutely arrogant.

    What we do know for sure, however – you and me and your friends and everyone – is that we have been doing something very wrong. That our behaviour is wrong. That our behaviour every day is wrong.

    DH: If I understand what you are saying, then this connects to something that has troubled me about the way that climate change is talked about. Most of the time, there seems to be an implication – which the people who are most actively voicing it would not agree with – that, if it weren’t for the misfortune of the fragility of this global climate system, we could keep doing all of this. If it weren’t for the accidental, unforeseeable byproduct of what would otherwise have been Progress, then it would be fine. And I don’t know if any environmentalist, in their heart, believes that. But perhaps this is the arrogance you are talking about, the persistence of the god-like arrogance of industrial man, even within the way we talk about the horror of the mess we have made of the world?

    GE: At the same time you have the best scientists in Germany at the Wuppertal Institute, after five years and a great amount of funding, they presented a most radical proposal: they suggested the reduction of the consumption of everything by 90%. That is really more radical than any other environmentalists. But, basically, to avoid any change!

    DH: Yes, to achieve a version of how we live now which is as close as possible to how we live now, but without doing the damage on that particular front.

    GE: That is what we need to stop doing. We cannot continue in that path. Because after two or three great disasters, a few tsunamis or Fukushimas – after that, some people will say: well, given the irresponsibility of the 7 billion people, what we need is a good, global authoritarian government to save poor Mother Earth. Then we will have control over everyone. And many people will say, ‘Oh yes, finally something is being done!’

    DH: It’s true, those arguments are starting to be voiced.

    GE: That is part of the horror. That is why the horror is inside us. It’s not only outside. It’s not just the powers that be, we have been infected with it. Then we need to stop. But I think, again, people are doing that. I think that there are millions of people saying, ‘No, I need to stop by myself,’ doing whatever it is.

    DH: This is one of the things that Paul and I have encountered with Dark Mountain, over the last few years. The response to what we’ve been doing has been incredibly polarised. It’s been polarised between relief and anger. Relief from people who feel like they have been given permission to be honest, to voice their misgivings about where we had ended up, in an environmentalism that had ended up focused on calculative rationality and engineering solutions. And anger from those for whom it is absolute heresy to admit the limits of our ability to control things. There is a real problem in Western culture of not being able to conceive of any gap between control and despair. Either we can take control of a situation, or we’re in hell and we might as well curl up and die right now. It is difficult for people, particularly in the West, particularly in the environmental movement, to hear the idea of letting go of the illusion of control as anything other than giving up.

    GE: Well, instead of talking in general about global warming and these statistics, let’s bring it down to things that matter for all of us. Like what is happening with food today. There is a poem by Eduardo Galeano which says: in these times of global fear, there are some people afraid of hunger, and the others are afraid of eating. There is a very real reason to be afraid of hunger, in every country. It’s not just a question of poor countries. In Britain or the United States, there are people who are afraid of hunger today because they do not know what will happen next month. The others are afraid of eating, why? Because we know what is in our plates. Our bodies are already poisoned, infected. It is not only junk food, it’s not only that it is not nourishing, it is full of poison, things that are damaging our health. And then, what … are we going to hope that the G8, the G7, the G20 or whatever will control the agribusiness and will stop what is happening, fix it? Are we hoping that Monsanto and Walmart will have a kind of moral epiphany and will stop doing what they are doing?

    DH: I think the reality is that people aren’t hoping at all. But what they are fearing is, firstly, that there are 7 billion people on the planet now. People say to me, ‘You can’t feed that number of people without the agro-industrial complex: the only reason why the global population has got so big is because these agro-industrial technologies have enabled us to feed so many more people than the Earth can feed on its own.’ That’s the first fear that is very prevalent, when people think about this. And the second is almost a culture-level fear, that says, ‘Peasant life is nasty, brutish and short – and you’re saying that we should go back to that life?’

    GE: I can understand, because that has been constructed in our minds for many, many years, particularly in the North. Since the 1970s it was constructed that way. That’s when hunger became the great business of the century and justified all the subsidies for food in Europe and the United States: they started to talk about ‘food power’ and hunger and all these kind of things.

    But we need to see the alternative picture. First, one figure that is not well known: more than half of what we eat today in the world is produced by the people themselves. Not by Monsanto, not by agribusiness, not by the big companies: it’s by the people themselves. The Via Campesina, the biggest organisation in history, they have been talking about this figure. They know it, because they are part of these millions that are producing their own food. They defined the idea of ‘food sovereignty’: it’s not the market and it’s not the state that must tell us what to eat, but we must find it and produce it by ourselves.

    But this is not going to be the back-to-the-land movement of the ’60s. First of all, because now more than 50% of the people on Earth are urban, we cannot produce food for everyone in the countryside. We need to produce food in the cities. And the beautiful thing is that it is absolutely possible. One hundred years ago, Paris was exporting food. Today, people are discovering that producing food in the cities is not only very simple but it is very beautiful.

    * * *

    GE: As you know, one Mr. Crapper invented for Queen Victoria what we now know as the water closet, the first toilet and the whole thing of the sewerage, and this clearly reformulated the whole urban environment. First of all I must say that this is very, very modern. In 1945, in the most advanced country, which was the United States, only a third of the people had sewerage. This clearly is something very modern that reformulated all the cities and created a real addiction to the flush toilet. There are some people who cannot live without the flush toilet. For them, it’s a fundamental need. But now there are many environmentalists seeing that it was a very wrong decision, that it was a very stupid technology, that it is doing more damage than cars to the environment. When you mix these three marvellous substances, shit, urine and water, you are creating a poisonous cocktail that contaminates everything. It’s a problem of public health, of cost, everything…

    DH: It’s a waste of all three things that can, if handled better, be put to better use. But it’s not just that, it’s that once you have the flush toilet you are connected to a system. Think of the nightmare of The Matrix, with everyone in their tanks, stuck full of tubes, plugged in to this virtual reality. Part of why that nightmare haunts us it that is such a good description of what we take for granted: the kind of relationship we have to infrastructure is a relationship of dependence on unthinkably large, centralised systems. It’s not just that we are born into incubators where we’re stuck full of tubes, or that we die stuck full of tubes. It’s that we plug ourselves in to tubes at critical junctures in our life, every day.

    GE: We wash our hands and that’s it, we don’t see how we are connected. When we create our composting toilets, this is about how to disconnect your stomach from any centralised bureaucracy. What is the feeling of political revelation that you have, when you don’t have those tubes and when you are not controlled!

    DH: You’re dealing with your own shit.

    GE: That is the fundamental question. Are we ready to deal with our own shit?

    Another story that usually is very counterproductive, I don’t know if you can include this. I was visiting a magnificent group of people in Mexico City after the earthquake, reconstructing their houses. It was really an incredible group of 48 families working together for the reconstruction. I came one day to visit them with a colleague from my office, a woman, and then we found them very excited, in an assembly, discussing the problem. That morning one guy, one of them, attempted to rape a four-year-old girl of the community. He could not conclude the thing because they found him when he was trying to do that. They of course immediately examined the girl, the girl has no physical harm, and then they had him in a room and they were discussing what to do.

    My colleague and I say, ‘But what are you discussing? You need to call the police to put this guy in jail!’

    And then they immediately reject this, saying, ‘What is the purpose? To transform him into a criminal?’

    Then my colleague did not know what to say. ‘Well, at least you need to send him to a psychiatric clinic because he’s a very sick guy. It’s a clear pathology.’

    ‘What is the purpose? To transform him into a fool?’

    She did not know how to react and they continued discussing and then someone suggested, ‘Let’s send him to another neighbourhood.’ And then the others say, ‘No, that will be absolutely unfair for the other neighbours, because they will not know what was happening.’

    And then, after four hours of discussion they came to the conclusion, let’s keep him, if the mother of the girl accepts. Then the mother accepted and the guy stayed.

    Ten years later, I came back, I saw the girl was flourishing with an incredible amount of love that she got in the neighbourhood. The guy had married with another young woman of the place and they said she had already two children and they said they became the best neighbours of the group.

    I’m telling this terrible story just to ask this question: are we ready to deal with our own shit? Because it is not just the physical shit, it’s the moral shit.

    DH: The metaphor is so close because the institutional way of dealing with such a situation, whether it’s through the courts or through the psychiatric system, has the apparent virtue of allowing everyone else to wash their hands. It is pulling the chain and the shit is being taken somewhere else. It looks clean and powerful and efficient. But what are the chances of the shit actually being allowed to decay into something that contributes to the ongoing life of the community, rather than coming back to haunt it?

    Published in Dark Mountain: Issue 4.

  • The Regeneration of Meaning

    In one of his darkly observant essays on the fall of the Soviet Union and its lessons for present-day America, Dmitri Orlov advises against being a successful middle-aged man :

    When their career is suddenly over, their savings gone and their property worthless, much of their sense of self-worth goes as well. They tend to drink themselves to death and commit suicide in disproportionate numbers. Since they tend to be the most experienced and capable people, this is a staggering loss to society.

    Reinventing Collapse, p.122-3

    The spike in mortality that accompanied the fall of the Soviet Union has few parallels in history. Between 1987 and 1994, life expectancy dropped from 70 to 64, and the group whose likelihood of dying increased most sharply was, indeed, working age men. In other words, despite the material hardships of the period, it was not the weakest and most vulnerable who died in greater numbers, but the physically strong: what was most deadly about the collapse was not the disappearance of the means of staying alive, but the lack of ends for which to stay alive.

    Europe is not going through a Soviet-style collapse. (Or not yet: a report from UBS Investment Research in September 2011 estimated the costs of a break-up of the Eurozone at 40-50% of weaker countries’ GDP in the first year and 20-25% of the GDP of countries like Germany. For comparison, the total fall in GDP during the break-up of the USSR is estimated at 45%, spread over the years from 1989 to 1998.) The point I want to draw from Orlov, however, is that there is a powerful and complex interrelation between how we make a living and how we make sense of our lives. The consequences of an economic crisis can both lead to and be made worse by the crisis of meaning experienced by those whose lives it has derailed. If this is the case, however, perhaps it is also possible that action on the level of meaning might stem and even reverse the consequences, personal and social, of failing economic systems?

    The figure of the ‘graduate with no future’, identified by Paul Mason, has the advantage of youth, yet in other ways she resembles Orlov’s successful middle-aged man. People are capable of enduring great hardship, so long as they can find meaning in their situation, but it is hard to find meaning in the hundredth rejection letter. The feeling of having done everything right and still got nowhere leads to a particular desperation. Against this background, the actions of those who might identify with Mason’s description – whether as indignados in the squares of Spain, or as Edgeryders entering the corridors of Strasbourg and Brussels – are not least a search for meaning, for new frameworks in which to make sense of our lives when the promises that framed the labour market for our parents no longer ring true.

    Four years ago, in ‘The Future of Unemployment’, I suggested that it might be helpful to distinguish three types of need which, broadly speaking, we have looked to employment to provide. I want to return to this model as a way of structuring a search for examples of effective action on the level of meaning. Departing slightly from the original terms, I would summarise these types of need as follows:

    1. Economic/Practical: How do I pay the rent?
    2. Social/Psychological: Who am I in the eyes of others?
    3. Directional: What do I get out of bed for in the morning? And where do I see myself in the future?

    Those who find it difficult to access the labour market are also likely to find answering these questions more difficult. The stories shared on the Edgeryders platform during 2011-12 illustrate the variety of ways in which young people find their access the labour market limited: not only through unemployment, but underemployment, casualisation and the prevalence of short-term contracts, the increasing cost of education in certain countries, the role of unpaid internships as a path to accessing certain industries. Where skills and qualifications have been acquired through formal education, many find themselves unable to secure work that makes use of these; where skills are acquired informally, the challenge is to represent these effectively to potential employers. Above all, the situation is defined by the interaction between two major processes: a long-term change in the structure of European labour markets, offering new entrants a poorer deal than had been the case for their parents’ generation, has been exacerbated by the effects of the economic crisis that began in 2008.

    If the situation of those struggling to access the labour market can be expressed in terms of the three types of need set out above, we might note that the last two belong primarily to the domain of meaning: our ability to answer them is closely related to our ability to make sense of our lives. Based on this, I suggest that we look for two stages in projects that might constitute effective action on the level of meaning: first, the ability to substitute for employment in providing social identity and a sense of direction; and, second, the potential for this to lead to new means of meeting practical needs.

    With this structure in mind, I want to consider briefly a few examples which I think offer clues to what this may look like in practice.

    Centers for New Work: During the collapse in employment in the US auto industry in the early 1980s, the philosopher Frithjof Bergmann worked with employers, unions and community organisations in Flint, Michigan to create the Center for New Work. ‘We are in the beginning of a great scarcity of jobs,’ Bergmann argued, ‘but not of work.’ Instead of making redundancies, he proposed that employers share out the remaining jobs on a rotating work schedule. Workers would alternate between extended periods in traditional industrial work and similar periods pursuing ‘New Work’. The latter included local production to meet practical needs, but also the right of everyone to spend a significant amount of their time pursuing a personally meaningful project.

    Access Space: In Sheffield, England – another post-industrial city, similarly hit by unemployment in the early 1980s – the artist James Wallbank and friends set up what has become the UK’s longest-running free internet learning centre. As described by NESTA, ‘The centre brings together old computers and new open source software to create a radical, sustainable response to industrial decline and social dislocation.’ In conversation, Wallbank has emphasised to me the importance of the social and directional role of participation at Access Space: for those who have been long-term unemployed, the change in the shape of their lives on becoming a regular participant is often huge; by comparison, the change from being a regular participant to entering employment is relatively small. From my own observation, another key aspect of the Access Space model is the power of its insistence on self-referral: this means that participants are drawn from a range of social and economic backgrounds, rather than exclusively from a target group identified by its deprivation. This means that participation at the centre provides an alternative to – rather than a reinforcement of – a negative social identification.

    West Norwood Feast: In 2010-11, the agency I founded led a project to co-create a community-owned and -run street market in south London. This experience reaffirmed my sense of the power of what people can do when they come together to work on something that matters to them. In particular, talking to those involved, I was struck by how positively many of them experienced using their skills as part of the Feast, when compared to their experience in regular employment. Might it be that work that takes place outside of employment is more likely to be experienced as meaningful? And, if so, why? Several possible answers exist. The psychologist Edward Deci famously demonstrated that being paid for a task tends to decrease our intrinsic motivation, a phenomenon he explains in terms of the shift of the ‘locus of motivation’. Meanwhile, as I argued in ‘The Future We Deserve’, the logic of maximising productivity has made industrial-era employment an unprecedentedly anti-social form of work. More practically, though, are there ways we can build a better relationship between meaningful work and our ability to pay the rent?

    House concerts: The music industry has been through huge disruption since the 1990s, not least as a result of the rise of filesharing. The solo bass player Steve Lawson is an example of an independent musician who has spent his career developing new models for making a living and documenting the realities of this on his blog. He sells downloads of his albums on a pay-what-you-want basis and makes ‘house concert’ tours on which he plays in the front rooms of fans, many of whom have first met him online. Reading his accounts of this, two things are clear: first, that these models, drawing on the strengths of networked technologies, allow for a far more meaningful relationship with his audience than was possible in the music industry of the pre-Napster era; and, second, that house concerts also make touring economically viable for independent musicians in a way that was harder when playing traditional venues. Are there other areas in which socially-embedded grassroots economies can thrive where high-overhead conventional economies struggle? (For another take on the potential of low-overhead economic models, see Kevin Carson’s The Homebrew Industrial Revolution.)

    The Unmonastery: One of the projects to emerge from the first phase of Edgeryders was a proposal for something called an Unmonastery: ‘a creative refuge bound to host problem solvers and change makers, who together work to solve (g)local problems, in exchange for board and lodging.’ At present, this proposal is being developed by a group that met through the Living on the Edge events in 2012. The initial response suggests that young people are willing to take a step down in their material expectations, if this is balanced by sufficient security and autonomy to pursue work which they believe matters. The challenge will be to develop a vehicle for this willingness which is capable of ‘interfacing’ with existing institutions and accessing resources, which can achieve a reasonable degree of stability, and which does not devolve into a mechanism for exploitation. Daunting as this sounds, it is likely that we will see more experiments along these lines in Europe in the years ahead. (Edventure: Frome, which launched in October 2012, has parallels to the Unmonastery model, although framed in educational terms.)

    Five years into the current crisis, the default future for much of Europe is a world of longer hours and lower wages. Economic regeneration as we have known it could hardly keep up with the social costs of industrial decline, even during periods of sustained growth. That economic collapse can lead into and become entrenched by a collapse of meaning is not just a post-Soviet story, but one that can be traced in many of Europe’s former industrial regions, not least the areas of South Yorkshire where I once worked as a journalist.

    The scale and harshness of those realities makes me hesitate: I do not want to overstate the case for the examples I have discussed here. Yet I would suggest that they may offer clues, at least, towards another kind of regeneration: what might be called a ‘regeneration of meaning’. There is no guarantee that this will happen, nor that, if it does, it will take the kind of form we would wish to see. However, for those who consider the possibility worth exploring, I have a few questions:

    1. What would it take for this to coalesce into something serious?
    2. How far along is it already? (Is it further than we/others assume, due to its illegibility?)
    3. Where are the other examples that would build the case?
    4. What are the dangers? (For example, could the Unmonastery inadvertently become the workhouse of the 21st century?)

    First published in Baltic Edge (Global Utmaning).

  • Friendship is a Commons

  • Organisations That Matter

    Once upon a time, organisations had hard edges: it was clear who was on the inside and who was on the outside. This might still be true for legal purposes, but it no longer reflects the reality in many cases.

    I’m thinking, in particular, of all those organisations and projects whose existence is embedded within a community. That could be a geographical community like the one around the West Norwood Feast – the community-owned street-market that Spacemakers helped to create in south London – or a distributed community like the one that has grown around the Dark Mountain Project over the past four years.

    In cases like these, instead of a hard boundary, what you have are concentric circles of association: layers of people to whom the organisation matters in varying degrees. 

    People move in and out of these circles over time, as their relationship to the organisation changes. This can be because things have changed for them personally: a new job, family circumstances. Or it can be because, as they see it, the organisation has changed: it no longer matters in the way that it once did.

    The feeling that something matters is hard to measure. Of course, the conventional economic answer is that this is what markets do: where we put our money is the measure of what really matters to us. But embedded organisations can’t rely on money as a proxy, in this way, or not to the same extent as organisations with hard boundaries. Instead, if they are going to thrive, those responsible for such organisations need to pay more attention to the experiences of those involved, including the parts of their experience which are hardest to measure.

    When an organisation matters to people, it feels alive. You can see this in the way people talk about it: not just in the words they use, but in their expressions.

    The power of embedded organisations is that they are held together by other things than money. These other things often include time, energy, belief, attention, stories and ideas. Only rarely can they live without money, but they do not disappear instantly if, for some reason, the money stops. This gives them a kind of resilience which is rare in seemingly larger and stronger organisations.

    The danger for embedded organisations is that they can be growing and dying at the same time. According to their finances, they are doing better, yet they no longer feel like they matter. The fire is going out.

    The art of creating and sustaining embedded organisations involves paying attention to the life of the organisation. When those who are close to the centre of those concentric circles come together, do they still look forward to seeing each other? As people talk about the different elements within the organisation’s work, at which points do you see them come alive?

    When, for some reason, the fire burns low within an organisation, people begin to drift outwards. This is not their fault: it is their way of signalling to those closest to the core that something needs to change.

    In such a situation, the nature of the relationships that brought the organisation to life come into focus. 

    Usually, there are one or two people who stand at the centre of the organisation, who will be the last ones left if things go wrong, carrying the consequences on their shoulders. It’s not that these people own the organisation or can control it, but that they have a particular responsibility for it. (Because the organisation started out as their dream, an idea that was thrown into conversation and caught light.)

    Yet it is also true that the organisation could never have come alive if it weren’t for the circles of others who were drawn to it, who saw their own hopes or ideas reflected in what was starting to happen, and who between them began to make it real.

    When the fire burns low, those at the core can feel let down. They may start to complain about the lack of commitment of those around them, the disappearance of fair-weather friends. The feeling is understandable, but it has to be set aside.

    If you find yourself in that situation, I suggest thinking of yourself as the founder of a start-up that has run out of investment. Your community, the people who helped you make the dream real, are your angel investors. For whatever reason, you have burned through their investment, without reaching sustainability. If you are going to turn this around, you will need them to make a further investment. 

    Like any investors, your community will not be overly impressed by how hard you have worked or how much you have sacrificed. What will catch their attention is your ability to put together a story that is large enough and real enough: to make sense of what has been achieved so far, to be honest about the mistakes that have been made, and at the same time to put these mistakes into perspective by reconnecting with why you all felt this mattered in the first place. From there, you need to be able to make a case for what can be done together going forward and why this still matters.

    (I should say, the metaphor of investment is only a metaphor. I’m not usually keen on treating intangible, hard-to-measure things as if they are forms of capital, but in this case, it does fit with my experience and what I’ve seen in other people’s projects and organisations.)

    Embedded organisations, organisations that matter, tend to be those that have the greatest resilience against the unexpected, against the disruption of familiar systems and structures. If we are heading into a world of increasing disruption and uncertainty, the skills of creating and sustaining such organisations are going to take on an increasing importance. (These are also the skills of getting things done without relying on people being paid or ordered to do things.)

    So learn to pay attention to where the life is within your projects or organisations. Be willing to turn down the sensible option – doing more of the same, but larger – when you notice that it represents only lifeless growth. Don’t blame others when the life is going out of something, but go back to the story at the heart of it. See if you can retell that story in a way that will bring life to it again. 

    And don’t be afraid to admit defeat: it is better to walk away from something that is dead than to keep pouring your energy into it, even if it still looks like it’s growing. If you have been paying attention to the life within your work, you will have learned things that you can take with you. And, in my experience, the parts that mattered often seem to come back, in a new form, somewhere down the road.

    Originally published on the Collapsonomics blog.

  • A Storm Is Blowing From Paradise

  • The Space Hackers Are Coming

    The Space Hackers Are Coming

    In industrial societies, life has been organised into compartments.

    Ray Oldenburg identified the three most universal: the home, the workplace and the “third place”, the playful, sociable, conversational space of the pub or the coffeehouse.

    To these we might add the specialised spaces of industrial-era institutions: the hospital, where we are sent to be ill; the school, where we are sent to be taught; the prison, where we are sent to be punished.

    This division of space is the counterpart of the division of labour. Pursued in the name of efficiency, in many cases it has long been counterproductive, as Ivan Illich argued 40 years ago. Hospitals are not generally a good place to get well. Schools encourage us to think of learning as something which takes place through artificial exercises, in isolation from the rest of society, and under duress.

    Oldenburg saw that the third place was both the humblest and, in some sense, the most humanly-important of our compartments. We can push this further. What he called the third place is a native reservation of sociability, a surviving enclave of something which, in other times and places, has characterised almost every corner of human society.

    For all the wonders industrial production made possible, it also meant unprecedentedly anti-social working conditions for the vast majority of people. Even in the rich countries, where the physical degradation of earlier industrialism is practically extinct, the subjection of working time to the goal of maximum productivity remains. Only the most radical of employers, willing to become fools to the logic of capitalism, can tolerate that which makes work more enjoyable while also less productive. (It will be objected that enjoyment increases productivity, but while this may sometimes be true, it is wishful thinking to claim it as a rule.)

    Similar arguments can be made for the antisocial character of our homes, schools or hospitals.

    What gives hope is that all of this is in flux, at least in the struggling countries of the post-industrial west. The converging crises of the early 21st century create new possibilities, even as the massive public or private sector developments which have shaped our towns and cities becomes rarer.

    Under their feet, barely noticed, a new kind of spatial agent is emerging: improvisational, bottom-up, working with the materials to hand; perhaps unqualified, or using their training in unexpected ways; responding pragmatically to the constrictions and precarities of post-crisis living. Between the jugaad culture of the Indian village, the temporary structures built by jobless architects, the pop-up shops, the infrastructure-savvy squatters and open source shelter-makers, the Treehouse Galleries and urban barns and Temporary Schools of Thought, just maybe something new is being born.

    We could call it the culture of the Space Hacker – because these new players have more in common with the geeks, hippies and drop-out-preneurs who gave us open source and the internet revolution, than with the architects, developers or property industries we have known.

    Unlike Silicon Valley, though, these hackers have given up on the goal of getting rich. They are driven instead by the desire to make spaces in which they want to spend time, sociable spaces of living, working and playing, as they – and the rest of us – adjust to the likelihood of getting poorer.

    First published in The Future We Deserve (PediaPress)

  • Words Which Matter to People

    PUBLISHED AS PART OF THE RESILIENTS PROJECT IN COLLABORATION WITH FO.AM.

    ‘I don’t know that word.’ He shakes his head and starts to walk away, glancing back to add, ‘…in English.’

    It is the second day of my journey around Europe, a journey in search of resilience, and I am in a park near the centre of Helsinki, asking the locals whether they can help me understand the meaning of sisu, a word that is said to be central to Finnish culture and impossible to translate.

    ‘It’s something about the gut,’ says an economist taking a coffee break on a nearby bench. ‘It’s something about stamina.’

    By the entrance, a woman of around my mother’s age is taking her dog for a walk. ‘It is a kind of strong courage,’ she tells me. ‘People say that we won the Winter War using sisu.’

    During the winter of 1939-40, Finnish forces held off a Soviet invasion for 105 days, despite being outnumbered three-to-one. In the treaty which ended the war, the borderlands of Karelia were surrendered, and their loss is still felt, above all by those Karelian Finns who became refugees within their own country. Nonetheless, the achievement of having fought the Russians to a standstill remains a matter of national pride.

    The woman who stops to help me at the corner, by the pedestrian crossing, assumes that I am looking for directions. I ask if she can help me with sisu. She thinks for a moment.

    ‘It means that, if you really want to do something, you’ll do it.’

    Across the street, two guys with piercings have been watching our conversation, so I go over to talk to them.

    ‘Yes,’ says the first guy. ‘It’s the inner strength that only Finnish have!’

    So the rest of us don’t have a chance of having sisu?

    ‘Well, you do, but not in the same amount.’

    Why is it so strong and so important, here in Finland?

    ‘It’s strong because we go to sauna!’

    We are standing in front of the local library. His friend works here and he takes me inside to meet one of his colleagues. She brings up a website where anyone can ask the national library service about anything they want to know. You can search the existing answers, or if you cannot find what you are looking for, your question will be forwarded to every librarian in the country and you are promised an answer within two days. Someone has to have asked about sisu before.

    ‘Perseverance, persistence, resilience…’ The librarian reads off a list of possible translations, but by now I realise that what I am looking for is more than the English meaning of the word. I want to understand what it means to people here in Finland.

    ‘Years ago, when we didn’t have any electricity and we were into darkness for half of the year, you had to just bite your tongue and do everything that you had to do.’

    So sisu was the spirit that got people through the dark times of the northern winter?

    ‘Yes, I think you could say that. But it gets exaggerated, too. It has become part of this nationalistic story.’

    This story is something I want to come back to. As a concept, though, is sisu still important to people today? Has its meaning changed over time?

    ‘It still holds some sort of significance, even though life is easier than it used to be. As a word, it has a kind of power, the way that swearwords do.’

    This impresses me, the idea of a word that has the force of swearing, except not a negative force. I have been trying to think of an example in English, but I have yet to find one.

    * * *

    Why start from here? Because I cannot think of anywhere in the world where I could stop people in the street to ask about the meaning of the word ‘resilience’ and get into conversations like these. Resilience is a technical term, one which has spread along with the influence of systems thinking and come into use in a widening range of academic and professional fields. But it has no cultural roots; which is to say, it is not grounded in the experience of people’s lives and the ways in which people have made sense of that experience. Instead, with its aura of expert detachment, it belongs to that category of words by which we hold things at a distance. I doubt that anyone would joke about resilience in the way that Finns can joke about sisu, and for this reason I doubt that anyone can take it so seriously.

    This may not seem to matter, from the perspective of many of the discussions around resilience. When the subject is systemic crisis resulting from climate change, resource scarcity and the volatility of global financial and economic systems, how much difference does our choice of words make? My answer is that, when it comes to how good or bad a job we make of living through such crises, on a personal level and collectively, the ways in which we make sense of our situation can make all the difference.

    In his reflections on the collapse of the USSR, Dmitry Orlov notes that the group hit hardest were successful men over the age of forty. For many, their identities were so bound up with the system that, in its absence, they fell apart. Some committed suicide; a greater number drank themselves to an early death. What killed them was not the material consequences of collapse, but the collapse of their structures of meaning. The inability to make sense of themselves in the new reality turned out to be the greatest threat to their survival.

    When I talk about culture, I have in mind the structures of meaning that we make or find within the world. Push at the significance of these structures, their role in how we handle difficult circumstances, and you come up against a background assumption that seems to be characteristic of modern western societies: more often than not, culture is treated as a soft surface layer over life’s harder material and economic realities, a luxury which is the first thing to go as a situation worsens.

    You can see this in Abraham Maslow’s famous ‘hierarchy of needs’. In its popular form, this hierarchy is presented as a pyramid with five layers; you move upwards through the first four of these layers before reaching anything that relates to culture. Only once the basics of subsistence and security are satisfied do we concern ourselves with meaning.

    Yet, as Orlov’s example suggests, there may be no subsistence without meaning. When life is hardest, our ability to make sense of our situation is the difference between giving up and finding a way to keep going. Our words and concepts, the stories we tell, and the way we relate our present difficulties to the experiences of those who have gone before us are all part of this process of making sense. And while it is possible to speak in the abstract about our material needs, in the world as we find it, these needs are always bound up with structures of meaning and purpose, the ways in which people in this particular place and time make sense of their situation. Far from a surface layer, it seems, you cannot get deeper than culture.

    * * *

    Lauri is a sound artist who is fascinated by time and memory, not least the memories of his grandfather, who was among the Karelian refugees. Anu recently returned to Finland after six years living abroad. Her main project since coming back has been to set up the Helsinki Fab Lab, part of an international network of workshops whose aim is to give people access to new small-scale manufacturing technologies. We arrange to meet by the statue of Runeberg, one of the generation of Swedish-speaking Finnish writers who assembled a national culture for Finland. (A process which took place during the 19th century, when the country had passed from Swedish rule to become a territory of the Russian empire.)

    ‘At the same time, they created a situation where the Finnish-speaking people somehow thought they were worse than the Swedish,’ Lauri tells me over coffee in a nearby cafe. ‘Topelius, who was a friend of Runeberg, wrote a book about how this land is and what we should do. At one point, he says that Finnish people are lazy by nature and they ought to take as their role-model the Finnish work-horse. They shouldn’t complain so much about working.’

    Yet it was within this romantic nationalist movement that the idea of sisu became charged with significance.

    ‘It has this feeling that it’s an old concept, and the word is really ancient, but it was made into a kind of national cliché at a certain point.’

    ‘It got powered up with Finnishness,’ says Anu. ‘With the essence of being a Finn.’

    ‘It was created because people needed something, a sense that we have something in here, and it’s a legend, a created concept, after all, but it worked.’

    As they talk, a further quality of sisu comes into focus for me. It is not just about persistence and stamina, but sheer stubbornness, even to the point of stupidity. ‘You push on through, no matter what,’ Anu says. ‘You don’t give up, basically.’

    ‘And you do it because of that inner force. It’s not even because of you, it’s because of sisu that you do it.’

    ‘Even through the gravestone, you push through. That’s what we say.’

    ‘There’s a humorous side to it because, just like pushing through the gravestone, we also say: you climb the tree with your ass first! You just do it because you need to do it, no matter how smart or stupid it is.’

    * * *

    In 1986, having been mistaken for a Latin American, Ivan Illich was invited to Japan to address the founding assembly of an international resource centre for peace research, the result of a collaboration between research centres across Asia and Africa. He tells the story in one of his later writings, ‘The Cultivation of Conspiracy’, and explains his intention that day in Yokohama.

    I wanted first to dismantle any universal notion of peace; I wanted to stress the claim of each ethnos to its own peace, the right of each community to be left in its peace. It seemed important to make clear that peace is not an abstract condition, but a very specific spirit to be relished in its particular, incommunicable uniqueness by each community.

    To stress the right of each ethnos to be left in peace might sound like a formula for segregation, yet Illich was the initiator of the Centre for Intercultural Documentation in Mexico, and his earlier life as a Catholic priest had been shaped by his work alongside Puerto Rican immigrants in New York. It was these experiences that sensitised him to the damage done by universal notions: whatever words we use to make sense of an experience, these words have a history; they are drawn from a particular language and are rooted in the experience of people with particular assumptions. If we attempt to use them as abstractions, without acknowledging their histories, the result will be misunderstanding and confusion at best.

    This applies even to the category of words whose purpose is to hold what they speak of at a distance, the category to which I am suggesting ‘resilience’ belongs. If our hope is to cultivate the capacity to endure, the attitudes and ways of making sense of the world that will enable us to navigate dark times, then I suggest we talk to each other about the particular concepts within our different cultures. Ripe with contradictions, ‘sisu’ may provide a vivid example, but as my journey continued, I found myself in similar conversations about everything from the Portuguese concept of saudade to the seeds of resilience lurking in the darkness of the Czech imagination. Perhaps we could see every local culture as, among other things, a kind of survival strategy, improvised in response to a particular landscape and a particular history?

    None of this is to overlook the dangers of essentialising cultures and identities. The history of sisu involves a conscious project to create an identity, and the made-up quality of such concepts is best kept in view. They deserve to be questioned and tested, compared to the other ways in which people have made sense of similar experiences in different times and places, challenged as to whether they still work and for whom they are working. (How does the Finnish cultural identity that I glimpsed in these conversations – itself born of the complex historical entanglement of Finns, Swedes and Russians – adapt to the experience of new generations of immigrants?)

    I wish to argue only this: that the end of all our questioning will not be a set of universal abstractions that transcend the messiness and peculiarity of the local cultural concepts with which we find ourselves. That abstract technical concepts, however usefully they serve within their own context, will always lack the power of living language. And that, if we wish the qualities that we may associate with resilience to take root in the places where we live, we would do well to look for concepts and stories which embody those qualities, and words which matter to people.

  • Three Travellers

    PUBLISHED AS PART OF THE RESILIENTS PROJECT IN COLLABORATION WITH FO.AM.

    1.

    “I don’t think I was given the best careers advice in school,” he says. “There was no future in making things, they told us. If you were bright, you should go to college and study something like law.”

    With his law degree, he spent four and a half years working in data entry jobs and call centres.

    “It was work I could have done when I was eleven years old. But it wasn’t minimum wage, I was earning enough to be saving money. I always planned to have a midlife crisis before I turned thirty.”

    He was twenty-eight when he had enough saved to start travelling. That was a year ago. Since then, he’s been around most of Europe. On this trip, he is headed for Ukraine, then back through Moldova.

    He might have spent everything he’d saved, travelling as long as it lasted and picking up jobs in hostels, if he hadn’t found what it is he actually wants to do with his life.

    “I knew if I kept travelling, it would come to me.”

    It came to him as he was walking on the Curonian Spit, the sliver of land that arcs across from the Lithuanian coast to the Russian naval outpost of Kaliningrad. He spent a while helping the local amber gatherers, sifting sand. They let him keep the small pieces for himself. Afterwards, walking along this beach that stretches on for fifty miles, he realised that what he wanted to do was to make whisky.

    He travelled for a while around Scotland and Ireland, talking to people in the distilleries about how to get into the trade. Twenty years ago, they told him, you would have persuaded someone to take you on as an apprentice. Nowadays, the UK has become so obsessed with education, you need a degree for everything. That includes a Masters in Brewing and Distilling in Edinburgh.

    “So I’ll be going back to college in September. Only this time to study something I actually want to do.”

    2.

    First he was a portrait painter, then a seaman, and now he walks into the bar carrying a banjo and a rucksack with a three-stringed ukelele sticking out of it. He gets himself a beer, comes to sit at my table and offers me a cigarette from a pack of Winston’s.

    He asks me what I am doing and I try to explain. About resilience, the systems we depend on, the things that carry us through. I say that I want to learn about how people cope in hard times, why one person will keep going where another gives up.

    “Singing,” he tells me.

    He reaches for his banjo.

    “I know one English song.”

    Both the index finger and the middle finger of his right hand are missing. He fits the picks onto his thumb and the two remaining fingers and starts gently, once around the tune before he sings, verse and chorus. “Can the circle be unbroken? Bye and bye, Lord, bye and bye…” He has a way of singing out of both corners of his mouth, cigarette still held between his lips.

    “It is about his mother,” he says, when he is finished. Later, he tells me he has been to another city to deal with his mother’s apartment which he recently inherited.

    I order two more beers.

    From his rucksack, he takes out what looks like a cigar box. It has Greek lettering on the outside. He opens it to show a small backgammon board. Instead of checkers and dice, it holds a row of six harmonicas. He takes the first of them and plays a blues that sounds like a memory of the end of something.

    He was at sea for twenty years, an ordinary seaman and then a radio officer. He learned to tap Morse code in the last years before it went silent and the satellites took over. Three years ago, he came ashore for good. I ask what made him choose to become a seaman. He must have been well over thirty, at the time. He looks as though I have asked a question too big to expect an answer.

    “Because the sea is poetry,” he says, finally. “You understand?”

    A few years ago, there was a UNESCO competition to commemorate Joseph Conrad, another Polish seaman. Did I ever read Conrad? He had written a song to enter the competition. It took first place in its category. First place.

    When his mother’s apartment is dealt with, all he wants is a small place beside the sea, as far from the world as he can get.

    By now, we have finished our drinks. I leave my rucksack and go downstairs to the bathroom. When I come back, he is gone.

    3.

    “Sometimes it’s not so good to travel alone,” he says. “Three nights ago, I am cycling in the dark on an empty beach, and now I can’t tell if I did that or if I dreamed it.”

    He is awake when I get into the compartment and heave my rucksack onto the overhead shelf. Awake, but sleepy like a child that has just been woken. He asks me where I am going next and when I start to describe it, he brightens, and tells me the name. He remembers.

    “It was after nine when I came there. I was climbing in the dark and there were drums playing across the hillside. I knew that I was close, but I missed the turning and I had to camp in the forest. In the morning, I found them.”

    The moon is like a slice of caramelised orange over the station at Tczew, a moon from a children’s story. He gets up and walks to the end of the carriage to check his bicycle is still there. He comes back, reassured. The train pulls off again.

    “So, you will go there.” He is smiling to himself at the memory. “I think it is some kind of paradise.”

    He sleeps more than I do that night, as we draw in and out of empty stations, but he is already awake when my alarm goes off, a few minutes outside Warsaw. He looks better. Sleep has grounded him.

    He watches as I repack my rucksack.

    “You go through Bohumin? That is the way I would go from here, if I was going home.”

    Next week, he thinks he will be in Berlin.

    “And Zajezova,” he smiles. “You will be there tonight.”