DOUGALD HINE

Author: Dougald Hine

  • The Breadline

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

    The breadline runs through the middle of the Kallio district of Helsinki. On Wednesdays and Fridays, when the Hursti Charitable Association’s regular food distributions take place, queues build up along the pavement of Helsinginkatu all morning. Once a month, there is a special distribution for students.

    For some, these queues are associated with the crisis of the early 1990s, when the collapse of trade with a collapsing Soviet Union and the implosion of a homegrown financial bubble sank Finland into economic depression. At its worst, unemployment was five times its pre-crisis level and GDP had shrunk by 14%. The memory of this time came up in conversations during my stay in Helsinki, and while the Helsinginkatu distributions turn out to be older than this – their founder, Veikko Hursti, began handing out food to needy people in the city back in 1967 – it seems that lengthening breadlines during the crisis years left an impression.

    Today, Kallio is one of those places you find in most European capitals: a working class district close to the city centre where small apartments and low rents attract the young, creative and broke, until their activities in turn begin to attract those with more money to spend, and the rents begin to rise. No one hates this process more than the artists and activists who are its catalysts, and everywhere it is a source of angst.

    The Kallio Movement began here, a year ago, when the city council proposed to move the Hursti food distributions out of the area and off the streets. There had been lobbying from a longstanding local society: the lengthy queues were causing ‘unreasonable inconvenience’ to residents. One resident disagreed and wrote a post on Facebook, a proposal for a movement that would represent the larger group of people living in the area who had no desire to see it ‘cleaned up’. Within three days, over five thousand people had signed up to this proposal. The network that formed as a result has campaigned successfully to defend the food distributions and a local refugee reception centre. It is also organising block parties and flea markets.

    One thing struck me, hearing and reading about the origins of the Kallio Movement: there is a clear feeling that something would have changed for the worse if the evidence of poverty were moved out of sight. The breadline acts as a living statistic, harder to ignore than a set of numbers in an official report: so long as people are hungry, its defenders say, this inconvenient reality should be a visible part of the society in which we live.

    * * *

    My host in Kallio, Anu remembers an explosion of flea markets and street stalls during the crisis of the 1990s, as people looked for ways to make ends meet.

    There is an ambiguous overlap between the improvised economic activity that may constitute a type of resilience in times of crisis and the forms of activity embraced as a lifestyle choice by the artists, activists and hipsters whose presence brings attention to an area like Kallio.

    This ambiguity shows up in another of the projects that people kept telling me about in Helsinki. The first Restaurant Day was in May 2011, the same month the Kallio Movement was getting started, and the plan spread in a similar way over social media. It’s one of those plans that’s simple enough it can travel by word of mouth: for one day, open your own restaurant, anywhere you choose. In parks and clothes shops, at kitchen tables or in a basket from a first floor balcony, people took up the invitation, sharing their passion for food with friends, neighbours and anyone who came along.

    It’s easy to see why this would catch people’s imaginations, resonating as it does with the buzz of pop-up culture that has spread from grassroots DIY activity to the blogs of every branding agency in the western hemisphere. I remember MsMarmiteLover, founder of The Underground Restaurant, coming along to the first Social Media vs the Recession meetup I hosted in London in early 2009. A year later, when we were working on the Space Makers project at Brixton Village, it was a one-day festival of pop-up restaurants that gave the first clue to the new popularity the indoor market was about to experience. What’s brilliant about Restaurant Day is the power and lightness with which it scales: with only the barest infrastructure, it has become one of the biggest things happening in the city, providing a strength in numbers that allows unofficial restaurants to go overground. It doesn’t surprise me that, one year on, the idea has spread to seventeen countries around the world.

    Yet this is not all there is to say about Restaurant Day. For one thing, while the creativity and imagination people put into their pop-up restaurants is what grabs the attention, it is also a form of non-confrontational civil disobedience: through that strength in numbers and an appeal to common sense, it challenges the strict rules by which the making and serving of food is usually regulated. This is not an accident. The idea began as a protest, a response to reports of small restaurants and kiosks around Helsinki being fined or shut down for minor violations of these regulations. You could call it an occupation of this regulatory space: a challenge to the authorities to cede ground, or else evict an idea that people have taken to their hearts.

    This point has not been lost among the success that followed. You can find Restaurant Day written up as a case study in reports on Helsinki as a ‘Smart City’, its authorities adapting flexibly to networked initiatives that stimulate urban culture. Given the role played by Nokia in pulling the country out of the depression of the early 1990s – at its peak, the company made up 4% of GDP and 20% of the corporation tax take – it seems likely that Finland is ahead of many countries in taking seriously the power of networked technologies and the social possibilities they can make room for. But I want to suggest another take on the significance of Restaurant Day.

    Even with the breadline, Helsinki feels about as far away from economic crisis as anywhere in the Eurozone. Yet beyond the hipster pop-up appeal and the Smart City civic start-up angle, there is an edge of future reenactment to Restaurant Day. Think of it as a quarterly rehearsal. For what? For how we make a good job of getting poorer. As Kevin Carson writes in The Homebrew Industrial Revolution, the effect of regulation is very often to create tyrannies of scale: the overheads imposed make lightweight, small-scale, DIY or part-time enterprises almost impossible to sustain. It’s a point echoed by Dmitry Orlov in his darkly entertaining commentaries on life in a collapsing superpower, drawn from his experiences in first the USSR and now the USA. ‘Before the collapse happens,’ he says, ‘the solutions that would work after the collapse are uncompetitive and illegal.’

    The unlicensed restaurants popping up in Helsinki and elsewhere are, if not illegal, then deep into a grey area of regulation. That this might be a source of resilience is neither the intention behind them, nor the reason why they have proven so successful, but it may yet turn out to be an unintended consequence of their success.

  • The Dark Shapes Ahead

    Published as part of The Resilients Project in collaboration with Fo.AM.

    The dark shapes ahead are islands. Beyond them the sea shines and the sky seems a soft reflection of its light, and beyond both of these, the faded darkness of the next line of islands. This goes on for hours.

    The thousands of islands – tens of thousands – that merge into the Stockholm archipelago are one of the gentle wonders of Europe. This side of midsummer, their trees are a deep green that fades easily into darkness on a cloudy evening. Here and there, where land meets water, a red-painted house by a small landing stage. Where the channel tightens, you can see old fortifications: a marker of the times in which Sweden was a great power in Europe, and in which power in Europe was settled with armies and navies.

    Today, the big ships sailing through these straits are cruise liners and ferries full of Swedish and Finnish holidaymakers. Three hours into the crossing, as we pass into the open waters of the Baltic, the disco of the MS Silja Serenade is screaming with children in party clothes playing musical statues.

    * * *

    We are living through a moment of crisis in Europe of a kind that has not been seen for generations: not since the 1930s, or the summer of 1914. I hear this from people whose reading of events I do not find easy to dismiss, and I see traces of it in the news stories I follow. I do not think it is possible to talk about ‘resilience’ in Europe today without doing so against this background.

    And yet it remains a conscious effort to hold this in focus, while the blur of normality goes on around us.

    * * *

    All week the air seemed to be holding its breath, until by Saturday the only answer was water. We went swimming twice: diving in the afternoon from a jetty at Ulriksdal, then again at almost midnight, closer to home, the sky not fully dark, walking down to the shore in our dressing gowns. The surface of the water was black and silver, a different substance to the one we swam in earlier.

    I had been thinking about the slipperiness of history, how it escapes our grasp. When we study a war in school, the first facts we learn are the last to be known to anyone who lived through it: when it was over and which side won. Those who do not remember the past may be condemned to repeat it, but hindsight is very nearly the opposite of memory. To remember is to be returned to a reality that was not yet inevitable, to recall the events which shaped our lives when they might still have gone otherwise.

    * * *

    I imagine conversations taking place in Europe in the 1930s, as history darkens, and two thoughts come from this.

    First, that there is no wise moment to leave a bad situation, when leaving carries a cost. There is only a choice between two kinds of foolishness: to be too early and risk losing much for nothing, or to be too late and risk not being able to leave at all.

    Then, a second thought, that leaving may not be an answer to anything. This is not to speak against self-preservation, only to notice that it is not always a sufficient cause to carry us through.

    If someone were to ask me what kind of cause is sufficient to live for in dark times, the best answer I could give would be: to take responsibility for the survival of something that matters deeply. Whatever that is, your best action might then be to get it out of harm’s way, or to put yourself in harm’s way on its behalf, or anything else your sense of responsibility tells you.

    It seems to me that, if we can talk about such a thing as the tasks of resilience, then today these tasks will share that quality of taking responsibility: not an impossible, meaningless responsibility for the world in general, but one that is specific and practical, and may be different for each of us.

  • Rehoming Society: A Conversation with Sajay Samuel

    Rehoming Society: A Conversation with Sajay Samuel

    The work of editing has its rewards: often, during that collaboration to bring into view the full richness of another’s words, I find my own thoughts clarified by insights that I might have missed, had I only read those words in passing. So it was that, six months after this conversation with Sajay Samuel – pupil and friend of Ivan Illich – I found myself editing an essay by Bridget McKenzie which would be published as “Turning for Home”. At its heart, it seemed to suggest a simple and powerful reframing of that process to which Illich invited us, more than forty years ago, of “Deschooling Society”.

    The essay was a reflection on Bridget’s experience as the parent of an eleven-year-old who said no to her secondary school. To explain this decision, her daughter offered a drawing of a narrowing tunnel of time, beyond which stood skyscrapers and riot police: the world is going to get more modern and violent, she said, and the tunnel of school “would not protect her, but crush her identity and stop her from doing anything to make the world better”.

    I know Bridget as someone whose voice is listened to on education – a former Head of Learning at the British Library, among much else – and yet, as she wrote in that essay, after twenty years of professional involvement with schools, the experience of home schooling her daughter was to shake her assumptions:

    I had always seen a division between home as a place of comfort (if you’re lucky) and school as a necessary “outing”, a place that prepares you to go out into the world… However, I have also come to think that learning defined as “learning to work out there in the world” is a framing that is both unhelpful and untrue.

    For a start, the dichotomy of home and work embedded in our culture is incredibly damaging, and does this damage not least because it seems so innocuous. The idea of separation between home and work is responsible for increasing isolation in communities and for the loss of status and confidence of many people with home-based lives […]

    When most of us push off from home into the world of work, we enter an industrial system that is antithetical to the living world. We enter places that are abstracted from our planet home, represented in the dislocated nature of workplaces and effected in the systematic commodification of the planet’s resources.

    While editing these passages, the thought came to me: would Illich have been better understood if the book for which he was best known had been titled, instead, Rehoming Society? For our school systems were not his particular obsession: rather, he saw them as a graphic example of a deeply and damagingly counterproductive way of organising our lives.  (Another of his books from the 1970s, Medical Nemesis, goes further in analysing the same patterns of industrial counterproductivity, as seen in our systems of healthcare; but his original plan, on this occasion, had been to use as his example the U.S. Postal Service.)

    Illich had no desire to tell people what they wanted to hear.  “He could be so rude!” his friend Barbara Duden told me.  She recalls him exploding at a questioner, “You’re too stupid, I cannot talk to you!”  Probably it would not bother him, then, that his work is read by many as offering critique without hope of an alternative.  Yet this perception is not true to my experience of his writings, nor of the surviving community of his friends.  From John McKnight’s Asset-Based Community Development to Gustavo Esteva advising the Zapatistas, the members of the Illich Conspiracy – as I like to think of them – have hardly retreated from the world in despair.  Their work is evidence of the hope to be found in his writings; but finding it may be closer to the experience of getting a joke than of signing up to a manifesto.  There are no blueprints for building a better world here; only clues to how we might act, given the kind of world in which we find ourselves.

    The desire to offer a more positive spin on Illich’s message would scarcely justify the cheek of this retitling with which I am playing; but Rehoming Society works for another reason: it points to the continuity between those critiques of industrial society which brought Illich to international attention and the themes of his later writings. For a while, in the 1970s, Illich enjoyed – or endured – a level of intellectual celebrity comparable to that of Slavoj Žižek today, but in a time when the neoliberal mantra of “There Is No Alternative” had yet to entrench itself.  Even the Encyclopaedia Britannica opened the 1970 edition of its Great Ideas Todayseries with a symposium on “The Idea of Revolution”, including contributions from Illich, the historian Arnold Toynbee and the anarchist thinker Paul Goodman.

    By the end of that decade, the world had taken a different direction, and Illich’s profile waned.  The writings which followed feel, to me, like the work of a man who has been relieved from the bother of fame and finds himself free to pursue, in the company of friends, what matters most to him; though there is also a sadness at the path the world had not taken.  Together, they form a deeper historical enquiry into the buried assumptions underlying industrial society.  They have had far fewer readers than Deschooling Society(1971) or Tools for Conviviality (1973), but they are gradually being rediscovered, for the converging economic and ecological crises of the new century only sharpen their relevance.

    When people ask me where to start with Illich, I hesitate.  His writing is not obscure – it is powered by the desire to be understood, rather than the desire to dazzle – and yet it is not easy, either.  As Ran Prieur puts it, “Illich was so smart, and wrote so clearly, that I can barely stand to read him – it’s like staring at the sun.” If there’s one of the later books that will really take you into the heart of his thinking, though, it is Shadow Work(1981) – the collection in which he introduces the concept of “the vernacular”.  Starting from the history of language, he broadens this term out to encompass its fuller Latin meaning of all things home-made, home-spun, home-brewed. The vernacular, in Illich’s usage, names the mode of life (in all its plurality) which was overshadowed by the rise of industrialism, in which the dominant form of production was within the household or the local community, while commodities traded for money formed an exceptional class of goods.  As industrial society destroys itself, the remnants of the vernacular emerge from the shadows, not as some prospect of a return to an earlier and simpler way of life, but as clues to how we may continue to make life work and make it worth living.

    If such a historical argument seems removed from the business of our day-to-day lives, the experience of the vernacular is not so far from reach:  Think of the difference between a shop-bought birthday card and one made by a friend, or between the experience of cooking for people you know and care about, and that of working in a restaurant kitchen.  None of this is to say that exploitation and domination cannot exist within the vernacular domain; but it is to suggest that there are possibilities for meaning and joy within it that are far rarer within the production of commodities for strangers.

    And, at this point, we are back to Bridget’s challenge to the assumption that life is a journey outwards, through school, into the world of work.  In her essay and in the direction of Illich’s thinking I find the suggestion of another orientation: that we might choose, instead, to find our way home, wherever that turns out to be.

    The conversation which follows took place in the garden of a cafe in The Hague in June 2011.  I had spent two weeks hanging out with a gang of Illich’s surviving friends and co-conspirators, first in a small town in Tuscany, then on the edges of an academic conference on the marketisation of nature.  On our last morning, I wanted to make a record of a little of the thinking that had gone on during our time together.

    Sajay Samuel trained as an accountant in India before arriving at Penn State University in his late 20s. There, he found himself invited into the household that formed around Illich and, over the next ten years, he travelled and studied as part of that group.  We first met in Cuernavaca in 2007, at a gathering to mark the fifth anniversary of Illich’s death: I arrived knowing no one, and immediately found myself encircled with friends.  Since then, I have found in Sajay’s work a kind of intellectual trellis on which my winding thoughts have been able to climb.  It has had a powerful influence on my thinking and fed into the background of Dark Mountain.  Too little of that work has yet been published, so – as I told him when we sat down to this conversation, hoping that the presence of a recording device would not inhibit its flow too greatly – it is a pleasure to be able to contribute to making his thinking more widely available.

    SS: Thanks for the opportunity.  It’s perfectly true that not much of my stuff is out there, and hopefully conversations such as this will serve as vehicles to find people such as yourself to think in common with.

    I’ve devoted perhaps the last seven or eight years of my thinking to follow the threads put in place by Illich and see whether or not I can elaborate on them to enable my own understanding; which is different to saying I need to elaborate on them to make his work better  – that’s not the mood or the stance in which I approach his work.  Of course, it’s built on the conviction that the corpus of his writings represent a stumbling block for most of contemporary thinking– and that, if you don’t engage with it, you miss out on a significant, new and enduring way of thinking about the contemporary situation.  And therefore engagement with Illich is not only personal for me, but also because I think it illuminates our condition.

    Perhaps the best way to enter this line of reflection is to start with what most of us now take for granted and as obvious: the economic crisis and the ecological crisis.  Curiously and unsurprisingly, Illich had suggested the shape of both of these a generation ago, which points to the fecundity of his thought and the errors of ignoring the warnings of that kind of… prophetic seeing, if you want.

    DH: Indeed, and I would just add that what that prophetic seeing involves is seeing what is already obvious, but is unspeakable to those who have something to lose.  It’s not a supernatural divination of the future, it’s not futures “scenario mapping”. It’s speaking the truth about that which is already manifesting in the world, but which many people can get away with still pretending is not there.  That’s the spirit in which I see Illich anticipating so much of the mess that we’re in.

    SS: Right, so a clear-eyed view of the present – and I perfectly agree with you, there’s nothing of the tones of mysticism and New Ageism.  For me, it’s an extraordinarily tightly thought through set of arguments that start from intuition, but then are shown by argument and reveal the present in a very new light.

    DH: So among Illich’s concepts and thinking, what do you think is most useful to the present moment?

    SS: Well, this also touches upon something I’ve learned from you, in the last couple of months. I think the key concept is “the vernacular”– and I’m encouraged and emboldened by your way of thinking about, or not thinking about, “the future”– the sense of the tension between the Promethean stance versus an Epimethean stance. So, the vernacular for me is now increasingly occupying the position of the pivot in an argument that I think, if one does not engage with, we miss a moment and might continue in our blindness to exacerbate the Promethean temper. We risk flying away from being tethered to the earth in any sense.

    DH: And so how do we define “the vernacular”?

    SS: This is a question that becomes important to Illich around the eighties, at the end of his reflections on industrial society expressed in, for instance, Deschooling Society, Disabling Professions and Medical Nemesis.  He is attempting to write a postscript, he says, to the industrial age.  And in doing that, he is prompted to ask: what did the industrial age destroy?  What were the historical conditions that persisted and prevailed, upon which the industrial mode of society built by destruction?

    DH: And there is a sense that, in witnessing the end of an age, one is able to notice more clearly than one’s immediate predecessors the things that were lost in the beginning of that age – I think that’s a returning pattern in Illich’s later work.  So you’re saying that the vernacular emerges as a description of what was lost and destroyed in the foundation of an industrial age which he is witnessing the beginning of the end of?

    SS: And therefore, for him – or so I argue – the deliberate use of the vernacular as a term – instead of, for instance, “subsistence”, which would be Polanyi’s term, or “primitive accumulation” in Marx, and so on – is precisely to broaden the frame within which we think of that which was destroyed.  In the fading moments of the industrial age, something comes into view: that which the industrial age destroyed.  But it comes into view in its fullness, not in the mirror of the industrial age, which is confined to a kind of economic understanding…

    DH: And this word “vernacular” means home-made, home-brewed, home-spun.  It’s got a richer sense than simply “production for use value”, but it refers to some of the same things that, from a Marxian perspective, might be referred to through that lens.

    SS: So, for instance, we can predicate of the vernacular, “vernacular architecture”– we can’t speak of “subsistence architecture”– we can think of “vernacular dance”, “vernacular music” and so on, to indicate forms of life that are characterised as based on the household.  So it expands the view of the past beyond the lens of the economic. 

    And this then will become the pivotal thinking block about what happens today, in the light of the economic crisis, in the light of the ecological crisis.  I’m convinced that we’re thinking about these crises in two ways, both of which are limiting.  In the case of the economic, we think of the choice available to be between a “managed” capitalism and a free market.  With the ecological, we think the choice is between industrial machinery and a Prius car, eco-friendly technologies.  But in both cases something goes unexamined– in the case of the economic, the realm of exchange value is not problematised: it’s a question of how best to arrange those exchanges – and in the case of the ecological, the realm of technology is not problematised: it’s a question of its intensity vis à vis the environment.

    DH: And so, in the argument you’re making, the attention is drawn to the hidden consensus between the poles around which an area is generally framed.  It’s still very common to speak as if the space of politics is mapped out by the state at one end and the market at the other end, and what we’re doing is sliding a rule somewhere between the two.  And in terms of how we respond to ecological crisis, to look at how far down we can slide from the dirty tech into the clean tech. And in both cases, this is a way of framing things which misses out – and makes it almost impossible to see, from the perspective which these frames create – a whole world of people’s lived experience and how people have made life work, and continue to do so.

    SS: I love that image of the sliding scale: you have these two poles, and you have a little meter that slides more or less.  And it absorbs a great deal of the contemporary conversation, this frame.  So the Illichian argument, as I’ve understood it, is – let us first historicise this frame and ask, what is it predicated on? What does it lead to?  What kind of ways of living does it lead to?  And what does it mean to inhabit a way of life that is outsideof these frames?  

    So, in the case of the economic, if the sliding scale that unites these two poles – market and state, market and regulation – is in fact the commodity, then the question is to problematise the commodity.  To ask, can we not think of the commodity as putting into the shadow, putting into abeyance, something else – the non-commodity?  And ask what is the balance between these two that leads to a more enriching kind of life, a life that is not disabled by dependence on things that you have to buy, which means you need cash, which means you have to be inserted in the economy and subject to jobs and production and consumption.

    DH: The question that immediately begins to arise, as we try to talk about this – and, in some ways, is used to police the boundaries and keep the conversation within these sliding scales – the question is, aren’t you being romantic?  We know the argument: life in the past was actually a Hobbesian nightmare; people’s lives were shorter and more miserable, and yes, we might have traded a new dependence on money in modern industrial societies for massively increased material production, but it was a trade worth making.  Polanyi is a dirty word to a lot of people because they hear what he is saying as a romantic, declensionist narrative about a Golden Age of the past.  So how do we speak about the vernacular, in the way that we are beginning to do here, without immediately being heard as and shut off by that response?

    SS: So, the more trivial response to that kind of reaction – you’re being romantic, you’re telling us a story of the Fall – is to say, “Who speaks?”  Arguably, one would say, today, of the benefits of industrial society – of which you and I are beneficiaries, to some degree – that such a statement does not hold for the vast majority, who are in fact driven from relatively low levels of cash dependence into total cash dependence.

    It is only through an economic lens that the peasant is understood as poor.  I grew up in a time when my grandfather still wore no shirt and had a towel thrown over his head and we used to draw water from a well. For a man such as he, there was no need of a shirt.  Now, to say that a shirt improved his life, on the condition that he got a job so that he could pay for a shirt, is a curiously perverse kind of view.  

    So yes, who speaks – and for whom do they speak?  Arguably, the beneficiaries of this industrial way of life are a few, which necessarily entail that the many be uprooted, removed from vernacular ways of living that are low levels of dependence on the commodity, and be thrust into the commodity economy, which I would call being introduced to a life of destitution.

    DH: And one of the clues that has come increasingly into focus for me is to see how clearly the winners of what Illich called ‘the war against subsistence’ proceed to reenact the vernacular, under conditions of scarcity.  So that those who can afford a five-dollar artisanal loaf get to eat what was once everyone’s bread.  Unravelling that – unpicking the consistency with which those who do best out of industrial society restage, as commodified and pay-to-access worlds, things which look a hell of a lot like what we are describing when we talk about the vernacular – is itself a clue to what we’re trying to bring into view here.

    SS: So the rich man today is the one who can avoid the traffic jam, imposing the jam on everyone else!  Curiously, the industrial society and the industrial system is now denigrated by those who benefit from it the most.  And, as you correctly point out, and this is really worth looking into, the vernacular is brought back in a counterfeit form – in an intensely commodified form…

    DH: Or in a complex, muddled form – when I was talking about this with someone here yesterday, they said, “Among my friends, who are of a generation who don’t have a chance of buying a house because of what has happened in the property market, there is a willingness to spend more on really good food from the farmer’s market.”  So there’s a complexity to this – I don’t want to say that the survival of things which have a flavour of the vernacular in these privileged zones is totally counterfeit. Even this can contain a line of transmission which, as the industrial age unravels, might play its part in the reemergence of the vernacular.

    SS: Fair enough! But to go back to the challenge – you’re being romantic!  You want to bring back forms of life that were nasty, brutish and short!  – the second response is, I think, what the contemporary moment shows, and has been showing for a generation – the utter impossibility of the industrial, commodified exchange system to produce the kind of jobs that it promises.  The default condition for the vast majority of people today is to figure out ways to inhabit the interstices of a collapsing market system – and unless and until as many of us figure out how to do this in an open, joyful, constructive way, we get mired in a kind of helplessness, a kind of self-destructive, other-destructive hatefulness.  To experience destitution and not have a way out, either in thought or in practice, seems to me to compound misery with evil, to leave people – to leave myself! – in a place of hopelessness.

    DH: This reminds me of a conversation I had with the photographer Sara Haq, who was talking about her father.  He came to England from Pakistan over thirty years ago and has worked as an accountant. The one change that he has seen in the time that he has been here, he says, is that back then it was possible to support a family on an ordinary salary, and now it is not.  He sees England heading into the problems that poor countries have, without the things which allow people to get by and make life work where he came from.

    So what we are talking about is the return of the vernacular: the rebirth, the reemergence of the things which made life liveable in the past.  Because, in a sense, Illich’s historical enquiry starts with the question: why is it that these people in the past, who according to our lights ought to be thoroughly miserable, don’t seem to have been?

    SS: Exactly! I never forget the impression that “Stone Age Economics” made on me. Marshall Sahlins, the anthropologist, points out that the Aborigines of Australia spend vastly more time in leisure, in playing around – they are not this image of nasty, brutish and short, by any means.  And so, you know, the second vector of responding to this somewhat dismissive charge of romanticism is to highlight the fact that the promise of industrial society, the promise of market society, is undeliverable.  It just can’t deliver to the vast majority. And therefore, to continue to inhabit a thought-space which excludes thinking about the vernacular is to make impossible an escape from that which condemns you to destitution.

    This is the line of reflection where I think Illich has something very profound to say: look here, the vernacular was destroyed, but not destroyed completely, there are always rests and remnants.  People continue to reinvent, to invent in creative modern ways, increasingly unplugging themselves from the market or dependence on the commodity.  And unless thought aligns with that mode of existence, unless we rethink the vernacular in modern ways, in contemporary ways, I think we reach an impasse of the mind where not much more can be said.  The industrial system has failed: within that industrial mindset, no new ideas are possible, nothing new is possible, and we lurch between free market and state, free market and state, continually.

    DH: So does the vernacular have a hope, in the age of management?  Jennifer Lee Johnson was talking here yesterday about her work around Lake Victoria, or Nyanza, where vernacular fishing-to-meet-one’s-own-needs is criminalised because it doesn’t fit the fisheries management policies.  Is management in the broader sense, managerial politics, systems administration – is that a totalitarian thing against which the vernacular doesn’t have a chance of emerging, or does the vernacular have a fighting chance?

    SS: Right, so this has impelled a line of reflection: can we characterise in some way the nature of ideas and practices that emerge from and support the systems administrator? And it seems to me that here one can do a certain amount of history of the ways of scientific thought, for instance, or of managerial thought– and the first thing to observe is that the manager speaks from nowhere.  Arendt has this beautiful image, in attempting to describe scientific thought at the moment when the first moon landing happened, she says: modern science is predicated on viewing the earth from very far away, from the point of view of the moon, a kind of lunar– with all its resonances– a lunatic view of the earth.  The first thing to note about the systems administrator, he does not inhabit the space or the place that people inhabit.  Forms of knowledge that grow out of practices that are embodied and in place are foreign to and antithetical to the ways and styles of thinking that managers and systems administrators presuppose.  

    So you ask, is there a fighting chance for the vernacular to come back in a world of systems administration?  One way to get at this is to ask, is there a systematic difference in the nature and the kind of ideas and practices systems administrators deploy, versus that which grows out of embodied practices in place?  As a first pass – and one can elaborate the steps of an argument – but as a first pass, the lunatic view of the earth is sufficient to get at it.  So you ask, under what circumstances can the vernacular reemerge legitimately within the system administrator world, and it seems to me this fight has to be fought on the plane of legitimacy first. One has to make illegitimate and improper certain ways of knowing and seeing and doing, without which what people are attempting to do on the ground can fall prey to this charge of romanticism– Ludditism, cussed, backward– these words are clubs that stand in the frontline of the fight, the fight between two ways of seeing the world, seeing oneself, seeing what one does.  Unless one takes that fight to the right plane, it seems to me, we hobble ourselves.

    DH: So how do we do that?

    SS: What I’m attempting to do is to work out an argument which suggests or shows that the system administrator’s view of the world presupposes, as a necessity, the absence of persons.  The system administrator must necessarily look at persons as objects, as variables, not as embodied beings – not as father, mother, sister, brother – not as fleshy people with hopes and desires, but abstract models of people.  Statistical representations and medical systems, economic models, homo economicusin economic policy and planning – so you get these strange, one-sided, reductive, desiccated views of people that populate scientific models that are then used as armature, the weapons in a policy programme, and then of course become realised.  And what this way of seeing does is to destroy the condition for people to inhabit their own livelihood.  

    So the way to counter this is to make that illegitimate…

    DH: …to bring into focus the extent to which that is a way of seeing, rather than part of background reality – and to question its foundations, the assumptions with which it begins, and what we become, in our own description of ourselves, once we’re talking about ourselves as components within a system…

    SS: Let me give a concrete example: I’m in the university system, and one of the enduring vehicles by which the teacher and the student come into relationship is the reward and punishment grade.  And this goes back seventy, eighty years – work hard, you get a little grade; don’t work hard, we punish you with a grade – and now that relationship is reciprocally cemented: teacher does well and the student evaluation is good, else it’s not. This relationship modulated by rewards and punishment is based on a Skinnerian view of people, a view of people that Skinner gets from thinking about rats and pigeons.[6] The more we engage in this kind of technology of behaviour modification and control, the more students and teachers play to that description of themselves.  Today there is a great hue and cry: “What has happened to the students’ curiosity to learn? Why do they do only that which is demanded for grades?”  Well, surprise!  For seventy years we’ve been using this reward system, and now they behave like Skinnerian monkeys or pigeons – and everybody’s shocked?  The deployment of a particular view, model or seeing of people then gets realised within particular institutional settings, and the question facing us is to delegitimise those ways of seeing people.

    So what is the work that I’m attempting to do?  It’s to clear the space, if you want, in these small forays of war against– let’s say, scientific ways of thinking, for instance, or the systems view of man, or the war against the vernacular– open up different fronts, to clear the space for something different, which is already there– it’s not an act of heroism– these little wars, these battles are as much to clear my own mind.  The act of working through something, thinking through something, with you, with friends, writing about it, clears up in one’s own mind the space that needs to be cleared.

    DH: One of the things that I’ve valued about your work is the – I don’t know if this is quite the right description, but the search for a qualitative rationality.  Because the dominant mode of rationality for many generations in the west has been quantitative – and you can say more about the history of that.  But the gut reaction, the intuitive reaction against that reduction of reality to things that can be measured and counted is very strong, and the risk has been – and in some ways, this is where the charge of romanticism manages to get a purchase on us, or our friends – that the qualitative reaction against quantitative rationality often celebrates the irrational.  Whereas what you’re doing is an out-reasoning of Cartesian rationality.

    SS: I’m glad you brought me to think through again with you this particular issue.  Because you’re perfectly right that the fault-line, if you want, in contemporary discourse is drawn along rationality/irrationality.  Say something about the systems administrator and his or her view of the world, and they say you’re courting irrationality.  Say something critical about scientific ways of understanding the world, you’re courting irrationality.  And so my interest has been to get out of that game, to ask– who framed this game the way it is framed today?– just as we’ve asked regarding economy or ecology.  

    And there I find, with the help of masters, a curious moment in seventeenth century Europe, for which we can take Descartes as an example.  They’re inheritors of a theological question coming out of the high Middle Ages, as best I can understand it: how and why does God know everything?  Answer:  God knows everything because he made everything.  Ah, so God’s knowledge is complete and he’s omniscient because He’s made everything, so “making” and “knowing” are an identity!  

    Descartes asks the following question (I paraphrase):  Is the geometric form of a perfect circle given to us in nature?  No.  So how did it come about?  Answer:  We must have made it up.  Now notice that what he’s reacting to, or what he’s fighting against, is a long tradition – one might say, as shorthand, the Aristotelian tradition – of how “understanding” happens.  For Aristotle, very quickly, man’s “concepts” – which, etymologically has a resonance with grasping and touching – man’s concepts are tethered to the senses, the sensual understanding of the world…

    DH: So knowledge begins with perception?

    SS: With perception.  This is not the same class as what Hume and Locke, the empiricists, will call sensation, it’s of a different kind because for Aristotle, for example, that chair there, that object emanates, emits its form to you.  It’s not as if it is undifferentiated sensation…

    DH: …it’s not the sensation that ripples off from a mathematical reality; the chair is a presence which is speaking to you, and your gaze goes out to the chair – so perception begins with an encounter.

    SS: Right, and so coming back to Descartes, he says, look here, about these geometrical things, the perfect circle, who cooked that up?  We did.  Ah, so the imagination must be creative, in the strong sense – in the sense of creation ex nihilo, something from nothing.  We know there is a perfect circle because we made it through our imagination.  And thus you immediately get the context in which this claim comes around; we want to be masters and possessors of nature.  And the way we do that is by realising the identity between knowing and making.  We can makesociety, knowing and making, in Hobbes.  We can make property, knowing and making, in Locke.  And so this general idea that knowing is identical to making, exemplified by mathematical objects, forms the pivot on which the modern move turns.  And for me, then, that constitutes the frame, you see:  The reason why we privilege mathematics so much is, in part, because it discloses the knowing/making connection, and that’s the thing we don’t want to give up.  

    In this fight between qualitative and quantitative, the next move Descartes makes is to insist that any object can be reduced to a set of characteristics that can be quantified.

    DH: A set of variables, a statistical representation.

    SS: So the thing itself disappears and it can be re-presented as a set of variables in mathematical symbols – and we’re the inheritors of this move.  We have to understand that this move is done in the context of mimicking, if you want, the all-knowing God.  And what disappears from view is the world of the given, and so, for me, the qualitative/quantitative argument is an attempt to resuscitate, to go behind this original framing that privileges the quantitative: for what reason do we do it? Why do we privilege the quantitative? For a certain reason.  At what price does it come?  The extinguishing of quality.  

    And I find a very potent argument in Plato, for instance, where he says, look here – I adapt this – the distinction, quality and quantity, need not be that between irrationality, emotion, etc,  and rationality, thought and so on.  Rather there are two kindsof quantities – numerical, which we can call arithmetic, and then, “too much”and “too little”.  By definition, “too much” and “too little” are quantities, but they’re not numerically measurable.  What we have done in the modern world is to privilege 1, 2, 3… as the only kind of quantity.  But I can relativise, I can put under epistemic brackets, that kind of quantity by insisting on the superiority– and showing the superiority– of the second kind of qualitative understanding, “too much” and “too little”. For example, we can ask: have you gone too far, by measuring love in terms of numbers?  A perfectly legitimate, perfectly logical, perfectly sensible statement.  Number cannot provide an answer to the question of “too far”.  The measure of going too far by measuring love in terms of numbers is six…  Totally insane!  

    So, you say I want to out-argue the fixation with the quantitative in the modern – yes, but on quantitative grounds.  I’m counter-arguing it, not on privileging the emotions, not on privileging sentiment – which are, by the way, staged “others” to the privileging of number – but rather on quantitative grounds, though not numerical.  Insisting on the importance of “too much” and “too little” as the matrix within which number can be thought through.  Have we gone too far, mathematising the world?  Do we have too much of mathematics around?  It’s a question of using judgment regarding “too much” and “too little”.  

    And I think that comes back into the question of common sense – a commonsense understanding of the world, which is then rooted in the sensual and therefore rooted, more or less, in vernacular modes of being.  So, some have accused me of an overly structured kind of argument – but for me, that would be the line of thinking.  The vernacular was destroyed by a certain style of thinking, and therefore a certain way of being – call it “commodity-intensive”, call it “disabling technologies” – all superintended by a kind of mathematical understanding of the world that is untenable.  The question is, how to make the vernacular legitimate again?  You can fight on multiple fronts.  For me, having trained as an accountant, number and that zone – my thinking has been devoted to unpacking that.

    DH: And I think it’s a very powerful – partly because an unexpected – place to take the fight.

    SS: Right!

    DH: There are so many further places we could go from here, but what fascinates me about this conversation and many others that have been going on around Dark Mountain is the intimate entanglement between very long historical views and deep cultural questioning of ways of seeing, ways of knowing the world which have been background assumptions for centuries, with the urgent sense of living in a moment where a lot of things are in flux.  Maybe we could finish with – I don’t know if, even, ‘what happens next?’ is the right question – but, where do we go..?

    SS: I was very impressed by your way of thinking about where we go from here – the metaphor of return is not such a bad place to go, comprehended in its fullness. So, we had a brief discussion some time ago, and I told you of reading this essay where the man says, “When you’re at the edge of a cliff, you can fall off, and the sensible thing to do is to turn back.” That’s a kind of turning back, but as you pointed out, one doesn’t get a feel for return…

    DH: …because a cliff is something that can be drawn with a straight line…  To me, the return is – it has an element of the uncanny, because at the moment in a story where you bring back something from earlier on, everyone, including the storyteller and the audience, experiences this deep satisfaction. And that is because you have performed something which brings the cyclical and the linear experiences of time into rhythm, into timeliness.  And… I haven’t theorised this properly, but there is something about that which is very deeply connected to meaning, as we experience it.  It’s not the same thing as a desire to rewind – which is what is perceived as the romantic thing – you want to rewind to 1641, or wherever.  It’s not that, it’s recognising the moment when something from further back in the story weaves in and provides the next move, as you’re stumbling into the unknown.

    SS: That’s exactly right.  The present reveals, exposes itself in a way that the past, sort of, bubbles up again. Do we have the patience, the stillness to recognise that?  And through it, something else forms.  I think that’s the answer to where we go from here.  And in a funny way, my intellectual labours are directed to clearing the space so that we can recognise the past as it bubbles up.

    First published in Dark Mountain: Issue 3.

  • Despatches from the Invisible Revolution

    Despatches from the Invisible Revolution

    A wave of networked disruption swept across the world in 2011, taking with it the idea that today’s social technologies are only about throwing sheep at each other, or hiding away in Second Life. The new social forms which ride the network now make their entrance on the stage of history; yet the grain of networked reality remains puzzlingly elusive. Much of the activity which makes up the network seems too loose and haphazard to be significant, by the standards of the world in which we grew up.

    This book began in December 2011, as a conversation over lunch, and soon became an invitation spreading along the network of thinkers and makers and hackers and activists with which Keith Kahn Harris and I had been entangled in the course of that year. Within three months, it was in print.

    The invitation was simple and open to interpretation: write a response to the events of 2011, no more than 3,000 words, not an essay written at leisure but a despatch from in the middle of where you find yourself.

    This was the year when it seemed to be ‘kicking off everywhere’ and the pieces that came back reflect experiences of the Indignados movement, the Arab Spring, Occupy and the UK riots, but also events on a smaller scale. Bridget McKenzie wrote about her daughter’s refusal to go to secondary school and how the experience forced her to rethink assumptions she had held through twenty years of working with education.

    In the Industrial Revolution, you could point at a steam engine and ask: ‘What on earth is that?’ What defines the Invisible Revolution is that there’s nothing to point at, no totemic object that conveys the power and the strangeness of the forces changing our lives.

    Pamela McLean

    Despatches from the Invisible Revolution was published with Pediapress. The book is available through their website, where you can also find links to the online versions of individual articles.

    Despatches from the Invisible Revolution book launch, Free Word Centre, London, 29 February 2012 (Photographs: Andy Broomfield)

  • In the Future, Everyone Will Be Powerful for 15 Minutes

    Published in Despatches From the Invisible Revolution (PediaPress). 

    1.

    Rioters smash the windows of banks, the drum beats towards war with Iran, protests fuelled by social media take over the streets of another capital city. As 2011 reached its endgame, the cinematic surface of Mike Bartlett’s play, 13, could have been taken from the next day’s headlines. Into its dark, refractive world, where everyone seems to be having the same bad dream, comes an unkempt young man named John, whose friends had given him up for dead. He takes to giving sermons in the park, pulling at the materialist threads of a fraying society. Someone films him and posts it on YouTube, and soon his message is spreading, sparking a movement whose aim is not just to stop the war, but to start… something better.

    If the positive vision of the movement John finds himself leading was left undefined, this gave it a certain symmetry with the Occupy encampment across the river, at the steps of St Paul’s. In each case, the desire for change struggled to find a clear articulation, while cohabiting uneasily with matters of belief. As the play builds towards its conclusion, John meets his antagonist in the form of a polemically atheist and pro-war establishment figure – part Richard Dawkins, part Christopher Hitchens. Then his downfall comes when one of his followers acts on her interpretation of his message, with murderous consequences.

    Bartlett seems to be using theatre as a form of public thinking: not simply to present an argument, but to make the process of thinking public. ‘In the moment of writing,’ he told an interviewer, ‘I genuinely changed what I thought.’

    I wonder if this willingness to rethink out loud, to voice our uncertainties, might be emblematic of a generational shift which leaves the winner-takes-all polemic of Hitchens or Dawkins looking suddenly old-fashioned: an intellectual Maginot Line, built for a kind of war we no longer fight? Among those whose thinking holds my attention, there is a fluidity to the way ideas emerge, flowing in and out of the projects, actions and movements with which we become involved. Careful thinking is valued, but being right is less important than contributing to the unfolding of the conversation, and discovering something you hadn’t seen. This reflects the habit of publishing our conversations in real time, thinking aloud in written form, sharing our ideas in progress through blogs and Twitter exchanges that weave into our face-to-face encounters, and formal publications that crystallise out of the wider conversation.

    The interweaving of social media with the fabric of our lives is reflected in the writing and staging of 13. Its lines are punctuated with the sounds of mobile devices. Even the prime minister monitors developments on her iPad. Yet Bartlett himself is not on Twitter, and perhaps this explains the point at which the play stumbled for me. Among all the resonances of 2011, and the skill with which the production conjured the sensation of ‘continuous partial attention’, what felt out of place was the idea that a movement grown over social networks could be critically dependent on the rise and fall of a single leader. For those of us immersed in the network, a different mode of leadership and power has been emerging, and this was the year when it began to matter on a geopolitical scale.

    2.

    If I felt a twinge of anachronism that night at the National Theatre, the same condition returned more sharply a few days later, when NESTA and The Observerlaunched their hunt for ‘Britain’s New Radicals’ – and this time, my discomfort was intensified because the feature was accompanied by a large photograph of myself and my collaborator, Mitchell Jacobs, and a profile of our work as Space Makers.

    The main article, by NESTA’s Chief Executive, Geoff Mulgan, was awkwardly over the top. He seemed to be arguing that people like us should get the kind of recognition currently given to celebrities. He invoked the names of Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi, observing that they had received ‘brickbats, not bouquets’, and connected this to society’s churlishness in failing to value ‘the healthily unreasonable change-makers’ within their own lifetime. Never mind that it might be in the nature of things for the genuinely radical to be at odds with the mainstream of their day, or that it might be a little weird for a search for a new generation of radicals to be led by a man who had been Tony Blair’s Director of Policy, or that Space Makers is hardly the most radical thing I have had a hand in. Besides all of this, what struck me was how out of touch it seemed to talk about radical change in 2011 as if it could usefully be represented by turning the spotlight on a handful of individuals.

    The defining feature of the movements which shook the world over the past year was the absence of a Gandhi or an MLK. There were huge numbers of courageous individuals, heroic acts, and voices that at times seemed to speak for a generation, but even the most visible of these looked small in proportion to the events which we were witnessing. In a networked revolution, the charismatic leader is largely obsolete.

    The closest you could find to an exception would be Julian Assange of WikiLeaks: here, at least, was a figurehead the old-school media could recognise, and paint as a villain or a hero. Yet even as the leakage of US Embassy cables continued to work its way through the engine room of global politics, Assange had already ceased to matter. Whatever the eventual outcome of his legal entanglements, the momentum he had been riding has moved elsewhere. The kinds of loose voluntary collaboration which can take on extraordinary agency in a networked environment are equally quick to melt away. This represents a change in the dynamics of power and leadership: within the familiar organisational structures of corporations, trades unions, governments, schools and workplaces, over-sized egos and delusional behaviour might endure for years at the highest levels; in the new collective forms which ride the network, such failures of self-awareness are swiftly fatal. Key members of the WikiLeaks team took their talents and ideals elsewhere; new projects such as OpenLeaks sprang up to pursue its original goals, while the next wave of networked freedom fighters wore their anonymity on their sleeve. Meanwhile, those who stuck with Assange were, for the most part, a cadre of ageing celebrity Marxists who had mistaken him for a Che or Fidel for the information age.

    3.

    While the spectacle of Julian Assange suggests the demise of an obsolete mode of radical leadership, Occupy Wall Street brought another model for handling power into view. In the encampments that sprang up at Zuccotti Park, outside St Paul’s and elsewhere, the focus of activity was the General Assembly: a daily meeting held according to a process of ‘consensus-based decision-making’. For many around the Occupy movement, this process stands for an alternative to the power structures which have presided over deepening economic inequality and the dominance of an amoral, crisis-ridden financial system.

    Since the emergence of Occupy, the most common criticism has been of its refusal to produce a set of demands. For me, this misses the point: the best experiences I have had as a visitor to Occupy camps were of conversations, usually involving curious fellow visitors as well as committed Occupiers. There is a deep social good in the existence of hospitable spaces in the heart of our cities in which these conversations can come about: spaces that are not structured to the requirements of production or consumption, but to the possibility of coming together and talking about the mess the world is in, how we got here, and what we might be able to do next. If there is life in such a conversation, new possibilities for action are likely to emerge from it and be put into practice by groups of people who choose freely to combine their efforts. There is a great difference, though, between the flavour of a living conversation, and that of the consensus-based meeting; and the point at which Occupy feels weakest to me is when I hear people speaking as if such meetings are prefigurative of the world which this movement seeks to bring about. 

    For a first-time participant, the immediately striking feature of a consensus meeting is the hand signals. (Most famously, the ‘twinkles’ of agreement: hands upraised, palms forwards, fingers waggling, in a kind of silent applause.) Beyond these, there is a process whose promise is of an alternative to the drawn swords of parliamentary debate, but also to the closed doors of top-down power, formal or informal. As David Graeber describes it:

    The point of consensus process is to allow a group to decide on a common course of action. Instead of voting proposals up and down, proposals are worked and reworked, scotched or reinvented, there is a process of compromise and synthesis, until one ends up with something everyone can live with. When it comes to the final stage, actually ‘finding consensus’, there are two levels of possible objection: one can ‘stand aside’, which is to say ‘I don’t like this and won’t participate but I wouldn’t stop anyone else from doing it’, or ‘block’, which has the effect of a veto. One can only block if one feels a proposal is in violation of the fundamental principles or reasons for being of a group.

    Many people met this process for the first time as they were swept up in the extraordinary wave of networked social movements which rolled around the world in 2011, so it is worth noting that the technique was not born out of the new possibilities of the network. In its current form, it originated in the feminist movement of the 1970s, while among the Quakers, similar practices go back to the 17th century. And these roots prompt a couple of thoughts, for me, about the gap which I have experienced between the promise and the reality of the process. It is not my intention to attack consensus: it represents a desire for a more human, hospitable and inclusive approach to the exercise of power, and I share that desire. However, I do want to question the faith which I see people putting in it, and invite others to engage thoughtfully in such questioning. Because I remain unconvinced that this is truly a living, generative mode for handling the dangers and possibilities of power, adequate to the circumstances in which we find ourselves, and capable of leading us towards better ways of living and working together.

    My first thought is that the strength of the consensus process in its original contexts may be closely related to the specific character of those contexts. There is a commitment to discernment amongst Quakers, an attentiveness to oneself and one’s neighbours which grows out of regularly spending time together in silence and is reflected in their formal name: the Religious Society of Friends. One of the great gifts of the feminist movement has been its insistence on the intimate connections between the personal and the political; when taken seriously, this leads to a similar quality of attentiveness to how we feel and how we treat each other. I do not mean to put either Quakerism or feminism on a pedestal, and it is worth revisiting the latter’s influential self-critiques, such as ‘The Tyranny of Structurelessness’. Still, it seems to me that there is something vital in both examples: when we come together with the courage to take ownership of our feelings and desires – neither to deny them, nor to reduce ourselves to them – this can be the ground for powerfully effective collaboration. Meanwhile, in the absence of such attentiveness, there is a constant likelihood that our attempts to act for a good which is greater than our own self-interest become a covert route to the satisfaction of unmet desires. In this way, our meetings may become a vehicle for those who seek gratification in the sound of their own voice, regardless of their listeners; while our quest for consensus may turn out to have to do with a search for shared identity and a feeling of belonging, regardless of the relevance to any practical work. Under these conditions, an emphasis on the transformative potential of a particular process may be actively unhelpful: according it a sacramental function of incarnating the new world, while the life is draining from the vision that brought us together.

    If the success of consensus depends on conditions which are not described within the process (indeed, which are not capable of being described as a process), my second thought concerns its failures: might these be critical in a new way, within the networked context in which the movements of 2011 took life? This follows from the argument I made in relation to Assange: that certain pathological dynamics of power, which could endure for decades in a world of solid organisations, may be swiftly fatal in a world of fluid networks. If individual leaders who lack self-awareness are likely to find themselves suddenly without followers, collective processes which lack emotional honesty or effectiveness are just as likely to find themselves rapidly losing participants. They may survive as zombie groups, made up of those interested in playing a game which has little to do with their stated reason for existence; but meanwhile, as with Wikileaks, the momentum will move elsewhere and take new forms. Compared to the wild fluidity with which ideas emerge, spread or vanish within the network, there is something anachronistic about a process – however non-hierarchical – in which an entire gathering must always listen to one voice at a time. Perhaps the consensus process will turn out to be as obsolescent as the charismatic leader: cultural forms for handling power in an age when people could be expected to tolerate levels of boredom and self-deception against which we are now more likely to vote with our feet?

    These are strong claims that I am making about how networks may transform the dynamics of power, and I mean to develop them elsewhere. For now, let me just add that I am not heralding some networked Age of Aquarius: rather, in the ways that people are making use of these technologies, I see glimpses of an escape from certain particular deformations in the way that life has been organised in industrial societies. With luck, we may be reinventing customs and practices which resemble some of the better ways in which people have lived together in other times and places, while holding on to some of what we have gained; if so, this will surely happen by accident and improvisation, not design and planning, and against an alarming backdrop of social, economic and ecological upheaval.

    4.

    Future historians may argue over whether the Age of Networked Disruption began when Al Qaeda took centre stage in world events in September 2001, or when WikiLeaks followed it in November 2010. But they will probably agree that 2011 was the year in which its fuller implications made themselves felt. From our nearer vantage point, we now see the extraordinary power of people connected in networks to surprise and disrupt older power structures. What is harder to make out is the nature of the structures through which power may be held and exercised effectively and legitimately in the eyes of a network.

    Yet within the story of Occupy itself, we may find the traces of a new mode of power and leadership, one which corresponds to the experience of those who have been immersed in the social possibilities of networked technologies. For this leaderless movement has nonetheless benefited from moments of leadership from individuals able to hold the respect and imagination of its participants for a time. In the first instance, the idea to Occupy Wall Street did not emerge from a consensus process: it came out of a conversation between two friends and collaborators, Kalle Lasn and Micah White, the editors of Adbusters magazine.[6]Other names recur in accounts of how their idea was taken up and turned into reality by activists in New York. Of course, this partly reflects the media’s desire for an Assange-like figure on which to hang their narratives; yet it also points to the emergence of a humbler form of leadership within environments in which many of the characteristics of industrial-era leadership have been rejected. I suggest that is worth developing a vocabulary for naming and reflecting on these emerging forms of leadership, rather than insisting on a language of leaderlessness which may obscure what is going on.

    As a small contribution towards such a process, let me name two qualities which seem intrinsic to what we might call ‘networked leadership’.

    The first is that it works by invitation, rather than compulsion. Lasn and White float the idea of Occupy Wall Street to the network. They are able to draw on a following built up over more than two decades of producing Adbusters, but this only makes it somewhat easier for their idea to get heard, it does not guarantee that anyone will act on it.

    The second quality is that leadership in such an environment is transient, rather than structural. As the Occupy meme spreads through the network, others take the lead on turning it into reality. Its originators step back and do not claim any special authority or control over the movement – nor could they do so. Their earlier role means their voices will be listened to by many, but no more than that.

    In these moves of invitation and handing-on, there is something close to the way that one takes the lead in a dance or an improvisation. (By contrast, leadership within the kinds of organisation we have known more often resembles a wrestling match or an orchestrated performance.) Power is held lightly and provisionally. Whether such a style of holding power can handle all that history has to throw at it – this is, I guess, a vital question for the years ahead.

    In trying to anticipate the answer, we can look for earlier parallels. The phenomenon of networked leadership in the movements born in 2011 resembles the experience of the Free Software community and of others working with the new social possibilities of the network, and the lessons which they have drawn from it. For example, Gupta’s Law of Network Politics, which states: ‘In a networked environment, the person who knows what to do next is in charge.’ This captures the reality and the limitations of leadership within networks, as well as the advantage the network has over the organisation. ‘Hierarchies using the network experience dissonance at the point where the feed coming off the network proposes a better plan than the feed coming off the hierarchy.’ Knowing what to do next is not simply about inspiration in the moment, any more than the art of improvisation is simply making it up as you go along; in both cases, there is generally a long back story.

    Another parallel to the transformation of leadership comes in the experience of professional musicians who have embraced the network. The solo bass player Steve Lawson writes about the way in which the relationship between performers and their audience is being transformed by two-way interaction through social media, and the possibility that this is leading to ‘the death of global super-stardom’, an industrial-era model that was intrinsically pathological:

    Michael [Jackson] was rightly celebrated for his musical contribution, but his fame and its destructive influence on his life was out of all proportion to that… Fame is the downside to success, and the way it removes the consequences from one’s actions means that people like MJ who desperately needed help to recover from his screwed up childhood-in-the-spotlight never got it.

    The network makes it possible, in Lawson’s terms, for the binary division between ‘idols’ and ‘friends’ to open up into a plurality of possible relationships, with the result that life as a ‘small, mobile, self-contained indie artist’ like himself becomes both more viable and more enjoyable. He writes of the experience of a tour of the United States, playing gigs in the front rooms of people he had met through social media, and the mutually-rewarding encounters to which this led:

    What we had was a shared sense that meeting someone we’d read about, watched on screen and had communicated with was exciting, valuable and something noteworthy. They were, to us, very special people to meet. They could’ve blown it by being proper freaky unpleasant weirdos (as could we) but we were as impressed with them… as we’d hoped to be. And they, in their gratitude and excitement, hosted house concerts, brought their friends and family along to the shows we did, got excited about it, and helped us to take our music to an audience who were happy to become part of that story, and spend some money to be there!

    The music industry first felt the disruptive force of the network in 1999, when its business model was knocked sideways by Napster. There were times in 2011 when it felt like politics was reaching its ‘Napster moment’. Musicians like Lawson have spent over a decade working out what kinds of relationship between performer and audience are possible and desirable in a networked world, and finding ways to make a living on these terms. The parallels between fame and power, performance and leadership, are not exact; still, in their example, there may be clues towards the further evolution of the limited, transient and proliferating forms of leadership which characterise today’s radical movements.

    Whatever else, when Lawson jokes that the new relationship he has found with his audience must be ‘Celebrity 2.0’, he is describing a kind of recognition which is more appropriate to the networked age than the old-fashioned celebrity to which Geoff Mulgan proposes promoting a hand-picked selection of radicals.

    The old and new forms of celebrity coexist uneasily right now, while the waves of the network rise and fall against the continued power of old-style organisations, institutions and governments. None of us can say quite how all this will unfold, but in attempting to narrate its unfinished story – and recognising the power which such narrations may have – perhaps it is possible to offer a lead of sorts; an invitation to certain possibilities present within this moment of deep uncertainty.

  • TEDx London: The Education Revolution

  • Coming to Our Animal Senses: A Conversation with David Abram

    Coming to Our Animal Senses: A Conversation with David Abram

    In the opening pages of The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram stands in the night outside his hut in Bali, the stars spread across the sky, mirrored from below in the water of the rice paddies, and countless fireflies dancing in between. This disorientating abundance of wonder is close to what many of his readers have felt on encountering Abram’s words and his way of making sense of the world.

    Philosopher, ecologist and sleight-of-hand magician: even the barest outline of his work already suggests the webs he spins between worlds, the unexpected patterns of connection that make his books unique. As a college student in the 1970s, he took a year out to travel across Europe as a street magician, ending up in London where he hung out with the radical psychiatrist R.D. Laing, exploring how the magician’s craft of playing with the attention might help open connections with people whose levels of distress placed them beyond the reach of clinical practitioners. Later, he travelled to Nepal and Southeast Asia, to study the healing role of traditional magicians; once again, his own craft opened possibilities for conversation where the professional anthropologist would not have been welcome.

    From those encounters, he found himself drawn beyond the relationship of magic and medicine into larger questions about the ongoing negotiation between the human and the more-than-human world. This is the landscape he explores in The Spell of the Sensuous, which draws together a re-understanding of animism – rejecting the supernatural projections of missionaries and anthropologists – with a distinctive take on the philosophical tradition of phenomenology. If that sounds heavy going, the book is also woven with passages of extraordinary beauty in which Abram relates his own encounters with the wider-than-human world in all its strangeness. And at the heart of it is the deep question of how we became so distanced from our surroundings, so unaware of ourselves as animals in a living world, as to become capable of rationalising the destruction which surrounds us?

    Thirteen years passed between the publication of Abram’s first book and the arrival of Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology (2010). The length of time perhaps reflects the priority he gives to the spoken and the embodied, his refusal to accept the dominance of the written word. (As Anthony McCann, who first introduced me to The Spell of the Sensuous, muses, ‘Chances are, most of the helpful things that have been thought and spoken throughout our history were never written down, and most of the things that have been written down might not be all that helpful.’) When it came, however, the new book was if anything more ambitious.

    ‘A central question was: what if we were to really honour and acknowledge the fact that we are animals?’ he explains. ‘How would we think, or speak, about even the most ordinary, taken-for-granted aspect of the world, like shadows, or gravity, or houses, or the weather? So much of the language we’ve inherited is laden with otherworldly assumptions. So many of our patterns of speech, so many of its phrases, so many of the stories embedded in our ways of speaking, hold us in a very cool and aloof relation to the rest of the animate earth that enfolds us. Can we find ways of speaking that call us back into rapport and reciprocity with the other beings, the other shapes and forms of this world?’

    We met in Oxford, a strange place for such a conversation; a city which epitomises the heights and the strange coldnesses of ‘civilisation’. But from the moment we spot each other across Radcliffe Square, a pocket of warmth and wildness seems to open up. We spend a couple of hours exploring and eating breakfast, before sitting down at last in the gardens of New College, in sight of the old city wall, to film a conversation that would ramble across our mutual fascinations and our desire to make sense of the situation of the world. 

    What stays with me is the heightened sense of animality which you come away with after spending time with Abram. Later that afternoon, I stepped off the coach in central London and walked down Oxford Street, aware of myself as an animal among other animals, all of us always already reading each other in deep ways which go back thousands of generations. 

    DH: It’s funny that we’re sitting where we are, because one of the ways I’ve talked about Uncivilised writing is as writing which comes from or goes beyond the city limits, which negotiates with the world beyond the human Pale. And in The Spell of the Sensuous, you go to meet these traditional sorcerers, to learn about their role within the human community, but you notice how often they live outside or on the edge of human settlements. And it’s a stance that recurs in the writers and thinkers who have inspired me – Alan Garner talks about the mearcstapa, the boundary-walker, and there is a text in which Ivan Illich calls himself a zaunreiter, a hedge-straddler, an old German word for witch.

    DA: Ah yes, the hagazussa (from whence we get our word ‘hag’), which means: she who rides the hedge. The magicians are those who ride the boundary between the human world and the more-than-human world of hawks and spiders and cedar trees, those who tend the boundary between the human community and the wider community in which we’re embedded. It seems to me that the human hubbub is always nested within a more-than-human crowd of elementals, a community composed first of the particular geological structures and rocks of our locale. The stones and minerals of each place give rise to certain qualities in the soil, and that soil invites a specific array of plants to seed themselves and take root there. Those shrubs and trees, in turn, provoke particular animals to linger and sometimes settle in that terrain, or at least to feast on their leaves and fruits as they migrate through that landscape. Those animals, plants, and landforms are our real neighbours, the folks with whom we need to be practicing real community, if we want to be living well in any place.

    DH: One of the things I get from your writing is the sense of the abundance of the natural world. It strikes me that a lot of environmentalism has the opposite quality, that we often describe the world in terms of scarcity. The crises we face are expressed in terms of limits, shortages and scarceness of resources. So how do we make sense of the relationship between the hard walls against which our civilisation is hitting up, and the quality of endlessness in the world as you invite us to experience it?

    DA: It’s a puzzle for me, as well. The term ‘resource’ always befuddles me. If we would simply drop the prefix, ‘‘re,’’ whenever we use the term, it would become apparent that we’re almost always talking about ‘sources’, like springs bubbling up from the unseen depths. But when we put that little prefix in front of the word, and speak of things as ‘resources’, we transform the enigmatic presence of things into a reserve, a stock of materials simply waiting for us to use. When we conceive it as a stock of stuff, then there naturally comes a sense that that stock is limited, and bound to run out. 

    If I sense the things of this earth not as a resources but as sources, if I feel them as wellsprings bubbling out of the unknown depths, well, this is not to deny that many of those springs seem to be drying up. This is a horrific circumstance that we’ve gotten ourselves into. But the way beyond this mess has to involve, first, a reconceiving and a re-seeing and sensing of this wild-flowering world as something that cannot ever be fully objectified, a zone of unfoldings that can never be understood within a purely quantitative or measurable frame. This ambiguous biosphere, in its palpable actuality, is not so much a set of quantifiable objects and determinate processes as it is a dynamic tangle of corporeal agencies, of bodies – or beings – that have their own lives independent of ours. To feel this breathing biosphere as something other than an object is to begin to sense that there’s something inexhaustibly strange about this world, something uncanny and unfathomable even and especially in its everyday humdrum ordinariness. The way any weed or clump of dirt seems to exceed all of our measurements and our certainties. And it’s this resplendence of enigma and otherness, this uncanniness, that we eclipse whenever we speak solely in terms of scarcity and shortage. 

    DH: When you talk about how this world can never be adequately reduced to the quantitative and the measurable, it strikes me that there is a difficulty for environmentalism since it has become focused on climate change. Because Carbon Dioxide is so inaccessible to our senses, something we can only measure and not experience. So we are trying to train ourselves to a consciousness of something utterly outside of our direct experience.

    DA: You point to a genuine problem in the broad environmental movement, one which mimics a tremendous problem within contemporary civilisation: our culture places a primary value on abstractions, on dimensions of the real of which we have no direct visceral or sensorial experience. We are born into a civilisation that straightaway tells us that the world we experience with our unaided senses is not really to be trusted, that the senses are deceptive…

    DH: That realreality is this mathematical layer, which you can get at, if you use the right tools to probe beneath the experience of reality.

    DA: If we probe beneath the ‘‘illusory’’ appearances. Exactly. So this world that we directly encounter, through its smells and textures and colours, comes to seem an illusory – or at best a secondary – realm, derivative from these more primary dimensions. Like the fascinating but largely abstract dimension of axons and dendrites and neurotransmitters washing across neuronal synapses – all of these hidden occurrences unfolding behind our brows – which many of our colleagues believe is what’s really going on when we imagine we’re experiencing the world: the apparent world that we experience is actually born of processes unfolding within the brain. Meanwhile, other colleagues will insist that what’s reallycausing our ways of feeling and tasting and touching are molecular patterns and processes tucked inside the nuclei of our cells; that is to say, our experience is primarily caused and coded for by the nucleotide sequences in our genome, by the way certain strands of DNA are transcribed and translated into the proteins that compose us and catalyse all our behaviours. 

    Still other comrades of ours, working in laboratories very different from those of the molecular biologists and the neurologists, will insist that what’s reallytrue about the world is what’s happening in the subatomic dimension of mesons and gluons and quarks. 

    So the world of our direct experience seems always to be explained by these other, ostensibly truer and realer dimensions which are nonetheless hidden behind the scenes, and so our felt encounter with one another and with the ground underfoot, and with the wind gusting past our face, is always marginalised…

    DH: …and mistrusted.

    DA: …and one can sense, perhaps, that this is the very origin, the secret source of the ecological mayhem and misfortune that has befallen our world. Because it’s so hard, even today, to mobilise people to act on behalf of the last dwindling wild river, or the last swath of a great forest that is about to be clear-cut, since people no longer feel any deep affinity with the sensuous, palpable earth. Their allegiance is elsewhere, their fascination is held by these other dimensions, which seem more trustworthy and true than this very ambiguous, difficult, and calamity-prone earth that they share with the other species. 

    And although many of the experts who speak in this manner – relegating the sensuous world to a kind of secondary or derivative status – are avowed atheists, and although they will rail passionately against the creationists and any others who they think are caught up in a superstitious worldview, this approach that privileges abstract dimensions, whether subatomic or genetic, over the ambiguous world of our direct experience has much in common with old theological notions. It’s deeply kindred to the old assumption that the sensuous, earthly world is a sinful, problematic, and derivative realm, fallen away from its truer source – from a heaven hidden beyond all bodily ken, to which the human spirit must aspire.

    DH: This reminds me of a conversation that I got into on Twitter last week. Somebody posted: ‘All children are born anarchists and atheists.’ I sent it on and I said, ‘I think they’re born anarchists and animists.’

    DA: Well, there’s a lot of evidence that what we call ‘animism’ – which simply names the intuition that everything is animate, that each thing has its own active agency – that this is a kind of spontaneous experience for the human organism…

    DH: A sort of default state of consciousness?

    DA: A default, baseline state for the human creature. It doesn’t really seem to be a belief system, but rather a way of speaking in accordance with our spontaneous, animal experience. Since, for all their differences, the various entities I meet – brambles, stormclouds, squirrels, rivers – all seem to be composed of basically the same stuff as myself, well, since I am an experiencing, sensitive creature, so this maple tree must also have its own sensitivities and sensibilities. Doubtless very different from mine (and different even from those of a birch or an oak) but nonetheless this tree seems to have its own agency, its own ability to affect the space around it and the other creatures nearby. And to affect me. 

    Given the ubiquitous nature of this animistic intuition among the diverse indigenous peoples of this planet – given its commonality among so many exceedingly diverse and divergent cultures – it would seem that this is our birthright as humans. To feel that we are alive within a palpable cosmos that is itself alive through and through. From an indigenous perspective (and even, I would say, from the creaturely perspective of our sensate bodies) there’s no getting underneath the felt sense of the world’s multiplicitous dynamism to some basically inanimate, inert stratum of matter; rather, to the human animal, matter itself seems to be animate – or self-organising – from the get-go. Such is the most commonplace human experience: in the absence of intervening technologies, we feel ourselves inhabiting a terrain that is shot through with sensitivity and sentience (albeit a sentience curiously different, in many ways, from our own). 

    DH: And yet to articulate that is immediately to be told that you’re projecting: that this is Romantic, sentimental, anthropomorphic nonsense!

    DA: The assumption and the knee-jerk objection that comes toward us, over and again, is that such a participatory way of speaking involves merely a projection of human consciousness onto otherwise inanimate, insentient materials or beings. This reaction often seems (at least to me) a kind of wilful blindness and deafness to anything that does not speak in words; a resolute refusal to hear these other voices as anything other than meaningless sounds. Humans alone have meaningful speech; the sounds of birds and humpback whales and crickets (to say nothing of the whoosh of the wind in the willows, or even the night-time hiss of tires rolling along the rain-drenched pavement) cannot possibly carry their own meanings! There is no openness to the likelihood that these other sounds are genuinely expressive, and communicative, although they carry meanings that we humans cannot necessarily interpret or translate. Certainly we cannot know, in any clear way, what these other utterances – of redwing blackbirds, for instance, or of an elk bugling on an autumn evening – are saying. But nonetheless, if we listen with our own animal ears, uncluttered with assumptions, then these other voices do move us as they reverberate through our flesh. And if we listen year after year, watching closely the patterned movements of elk, perhaps apprenticing ourselves to the ways of the herd as it migrates with the seasons, then one day we may find ourselves spontaneously hearing, like an audible glimpse, some new edge of the meaning embodied in that bugling call.

    DH: One of the things I become more aware of over time as a speaker is the extent to which language acts as a frequency on which something else is being transmitted. The experience of the audience, or of the other people with whom we’re interacting, is as much an experience of something else that passes through words, in the way that music passes through a string on a cello or on a guitar, as it is of the rational, the formal content of language.

    DA: Yes, even in this conversation, it’s as if the denotative meaning of our words rides on the surface of a much richer, improvisational interchange unfolding between our two animal bodies. There is a rhythm and a tonality and a melody to our speaking, like two birds gradually tuning to one another; via the soundspell of our phrases, and the rise and fall of our singing, our voices affect and inform one another. I suspect that much of the real meaning that arises in any genuine, human dialogue originates in this inchoate layer, far below the dictionary meanings of our words, where our bodies are simply singing with one another. 

    But also, I was thinking of our brothers and sisters who insist that human consciousness is so profoundly different from anything else we encounter in the surrounding landscape, and that our sense of the life that we meet in a lightning-struck tree or in a lichen-encrusted rock or even a rusting, overgrown bulldozer is entirely just a projection – their insistence that the world be seen from outside, as it were, by a human consciousness that isn’t really continuous with the world…

    DH: That echoes the role of God, in a monotheistic cosmology…

    DA: It does, yes, it’s a kind of bodiless view from outside the world, one which flattens all of this diverse, multiplicitous otherness into just one kind of presence, the so-called material world, a mass of basically inert or mechanically-determined stuff. But as soon as we allow that things have their own agency, their own interior animation – their own pulse, so to speak – it becomes possible to notice how oddly different these various beings are from one another and from ourselves. If I insist that rocks have no life or agency whatsoever, then I can’t easily notice or account for the way that a slab of granite affects me very differently than does a sandstone boulder, or the manner in which each influences the space around it in a distinct way. But as soon as I allow that that rock is not entirely inert, then I can begin to feel into the very different style and activity of that sandstone relative to the granite’s way of being, or to that of a piece of marble. So this is really a way of beginning to access the irreducible plurality of styles, or velocities, or rhythms of being, of waking up to the manifold otherness that surrounds us, rather than reducing all this multiplicity to one flattened-out thing, ‘the environment’.

    I can’t really feel into, or enter into relationship with, an inert object. I cannot suss out the changing mood of a winter sky if I deny that the sky has moods.

    DH: It feels like what we’re talking about are ‘ways of seeing’, to use John Berger’s phrase – or ways of sensing, since it’s not only about the visual. That takes me to something I was thinking about before. It’s a painting from 1649 of a man called William Petty, who was Professor of Anatomy here in Oxford, at the ripe age of twenty eight. I’ve been fascinated by this painting since I stumbled across it in the National Portrait Gallery, years ago. In the painting, he’s holding a skull in one hand, and in his other hand is an anatomy textbook open at the drawing of the skull, and from where the hands are it’s as if you are watching the scales of the seventeenth-century tipping away from the symbolic and the physical, real skull, towards the new reality – quantitative, measured, anatomised, cut open to reveal its mathematical properties.

    DA: Wow.

    DH: And what’s remarkable is that Petty the anatomist stands between two other phases of Petty’s life. Before that, during the Civil War, he had been in Paris with Thomas Hobbes, studying optics. And this is the moment in which, as Illich discusses, you are passing from an earlier optics, in which the gaze is understood as something tactile, a reaching out towards what you are looking at, to a new, lens-based, passive-receptive understanding, which sees our eyes as cameras in our heads. So that’s where Petty was before he was here in Oxford, and afterwards, in the 1650s, he went with Cromwell to Ireland, where he carried out the first econometric survey of a country, after the bloody subjugation of Ireland by Cromwell’s forces. And so you have, in this one figure, the conjunction of the transition to a new way of seeing; the anatomical cutting open of reality to reveal the mathematical new reality, hidden behind the untrustworthy evidence of our senses; and the foundation of modern economics, which is bounded in the same assumption that the measurable is the real and that the fundamental character of reality is scarcity. 

    DA: It’s amazing to think of that one painting as presenting an image of the hinge between these realities.

    DH: Yes. And I suppose where this takes us is back to how on earth we relate these things to the sense of urgency which characterises environmentalism, and the consciousness of the crises we’re facing. Because what I hear people saying is, ‘Come on, we’ve got five years to save the planet. It’s hard enough getting people to change their bloody light bulbs, and you want to up-end 350 years of people’s worldviews? This is self-indulgence!’ So what do we say back?

    DA: It’s a tough one, because it’s trying to speak across such different bodily stances, such different ways of standing in the face of this outrageous event breaking upon us, rolling like a huge wave over the earth. But the idea that we can master this breaking wave, and control it, and figure out how we’re going to engineer a way out of this cataclysm, is an extension of the same thinking that has brought us into it.

    DH: It presents us with a choice: either we can get control of this reeling system, or we have to give in to despair. To me, what I’ve been looking for – and what Dark Mountainis rooted in – is the search for hope without control. And I know, at the level of my human experience, that it’s only when I let go of control that I can find a deep hope, as opposed to a wishful thinking.

    DA: Control or despair, it’s a false choice. Total certainty or complete hopelessness – they amount to much the same thing, and they’re both useless. But also, the insistence that we’ve got just five years, or we’ve got twenty years, or two – these are all framed within the mindset of a linear, progressive time that is itself very different from the kind of timing, or rhythm, that the living land itself inhabits. The other animals seem to align themselves within the roundness of time, a curvature that our bodies remain acquainted with, although our thinking minds have become mighty estranged from this cyclical sense of time’s roundness. The round dance of the seasons, the large and small cycles of the sun and the moon. Certainly, there’s no way through the onrushing instability of climate change and global weirding without at least beginning to recouple our senses into the larger body of the sensuous, without beginning to tune ourselves and our intelligence back into these larger turnings and rhythms, even as the seasonal cycles, in many places, are beginning to shift. 

    Sensory perception is like a silken thread that binds our separate nervous systems into the wider ecosystem. Perception, beginning to attend to the shifting nuances around us, taking the time to slow down, rather than speeding up to meet the urgency – slowing down to notice what is actually happening in the local terrain, even if it’s a buzzing cityscape that we inhabit, noticing whatever weed is breaking up through the pavement at this spot, or on which skyscraper ledge the peregrines are nesting, or why these apples have so much less taste than they did when I was growing up, and what that says about the soils in which these apples are growing, or how they’re grown. I won’t notice those tastes if I’m motivated only by a frantic sense of urgency and of time running out.

    DH: One of the phrases from the manifesto which I’ve held onto most is when we say, ‘The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world, full stop.’ And I’d add to that, that the end of the world as we know it is also the end of a way of knowing the world. Whatever happens, to the extent that we are still going to be here, we’re going to live through the end of a lot of the certainties that characterised the ways of knowing the world that have served us for the past few lifetimes. And that’s not a utopian goal, that’s something that is going to happen whether or not we manage to do anything about climate change.

    DA: That’s right, and as these very conventional, long-standing ways of knowing begin to spring leaks – and in many cases the leaks are already turning into floods – this also suggests a replenishment of much older and deeper and more primordial sensibilities that we’ve cut ourselves off from for many centuries, and in some cases for several millennia. 

    But how do you approach the shuddering aspect of this turning point that also entails that there will be many, many losses? Not just losses of facile pleasures that we’ve come to take for granted, but the disappearance or dissolution of whole ecosystems, and the dwindling and vanishing of myriad other species from the lifeworld, other creatures with whom we’ve sustained a kind of conviviality, throughout the long stretch of our human tenure within this biosphere. We find ourselves living, today, in a world of increasing wounds. In the course of my speaking, hither and yon, I encounter many people who are frightened of their direct, animal experience, who are terrified at the mere thought of trusting their senses, and of stepping into a more full-bodied way of knowing and feeling, because they intuit that a more embodied and sensorial form of awareness would entail waking up to so many grievous losses. People sense that grief and they immediately retreat, they pull back and say ‘no, I want to stay more in the abstract.’ Or they want to retreat into relation with their smartphone or their iPad, taking refuge in the new technologies with their virtual pleasures. Because they quite rightly sense that there is some grief lurking on the other side of such a corporeal awakening. 

    What they don’t realise is that the grief is just a threshold, a necessary threshold through which each of us needs to step. The first moment of coming to our senses is indeed one of grief. Yet it’s as though the parched soil underfoot needs the water of our tears for new life to begin to grow again.

    DH: Well, the soil of ourselves needs us to go through that. But one goes through it, into being alive and being present.

    DA: It’s as if the grief is a gate, and our tears a kind of key, opening a place of wonder that’s been locked away. If we step through that gate we find ourselves slowly but with new pleasure being drawn into first one and then another and then a whole host of divergent relationships, each of which nourishes and feeds different aspects of our organism. We abruptly find ourselves in active relation and reciprocity with dragonflies and hooting owls, and with the air flooding in at your nostrils, with streetlamps buzzing as they break down, and with gravity, and beetles. There’s a kind of eros that begins to spark up between your body and the other bodies or beings around you.

    DH: I think it’s about a different relationship to time. Part of the numbness of the way of being in the world which has been orthodox in recent times is the enslavement of the present to the future, which to me is the core of the myth of Progress. So when people attack Dark Mountain for being gloomy and pessimistic, it bemuses me, because to me believing in Progress is absenting yourself from the joy of being alive now. And this is connected to the denial of death that is characteristic of modern culture. Part of the reason we have so much difficulty facing the ecological grief that is part of what it means to be alive right now is because we are terrified of our own deaths. And so much of the activity of our societies is a way of staying busy enough not to pass through the full entry into consciousness of the fact that you are going to die, and that this does not cancel out what makes being alive good.

    DA: I think you’re right. This great fear and avoidance of our mortality. Not just of our death, however, because there’s also a tremendous terror of vulnerability; a real fear of being vulnerable in the present moment. If I’m fully here, where my fingers and my nose and my ears are residing, then I am subject to a world that is much bigger than me, exposed to other beings in it like yourself who can see me and perhaps disdain me. If I acknowledge and affirm my own animal embodiment, then I am vulnerable to the scorn of others, and to all the sorts of breakdowns and diseases and decay to which the body is susceptible. There are so many reasons to take flight from being really bodily here, deeply a part of the same world that we share with the other animals and the plants and the stones. So yes, a fear of being bodily present within a world that’s so much bigger than us, a world that has other beings in it that that can eat us, and ultimately will eat us. The palpable world, this blooming, buzzing, wild proliferation of shapes and forms that feed upon one another, yes, and yet also jive and dance with one another – this earthly cosmos that our work is trying to coax people into noticing – is not a particularly nice world. It’s not a sweet world. It’s shot through with shadows and predation and risk – it’s fucking dangerous, this place – but it’s mighty beautiful, it’s shudderingly beautiful precisely because it’s so shadowed and riven with difficulty. 

    DH: It’s not easy, but it’s worth it. Easiness and happiness and convenience are things we seem to have fallen into the habit of believing are worth pursuing. And yet, if we think about our most meaningful relationships, the people we love most closely, even the best of our relationships are not characterised by easiness and they’re not characterised by everything being happy ever after. Most of the relationships we will have in our lives are easier than the relationships that will mean most to us. 

    First published in Dark Mountain: Issue 2.

  • Remember the Future?

    Remember the Future?

    Published in Dark Mountain: Issue 2.

    I am retracing my steps, trying to work out where I last saw it.

    In the north of Moscow, there is a park called VDNKh. It was built in the1930s, under Stalin, and then rebuilt in the 1950s as an Exhibition of the Achievements of the National Economy. An enormous site, full of gilded statues, fountains and pavilions dedicated to different industries and domains of Soviet cultural prowess.

    I don’t know in what year the exhibitions within those pavilions were last updated, but if you visit the Space pavilion, you will find a display on a dusty wall towards the back. It climbs from floor to ceiling, measuring decade by decade the achievements of the Soviet space programme. You start in the 1950s with Sputnik, then images of the Soyuz rockets, and it counts up as far as1990, and there is the Buran shuttle flying off past the year 2000, into the 21st century. By the time I made my visit, the rest of the pavilion had been put to use as a garden centre.

    I am fascinated by the way that history humbles us, the unknowability of the future. It seems like a good thread to follow.

    It doesn’t take a history-changing failure on the scale of the Soviet collapse to leave such Ozymandian aides-memoires. After the first Dark Mountain festival in Llangollen, I went to stay with friends in South Yorkshire. One afternoon, we climbed a fence into the grounds of a place called the Earth Centre. You can find it between Rotherham and Doncaster: get off the train at a town called Conisbrough and you walk straight down from the eastbound platform to the gates of the centre, but those gates are locked. So we walked instead around the perimeter to find the quietest and least observed place to climb over, and spent an hour or so wandering around inside.

    The Earth Centre was built with Millennium Lottery funding to be a kind of Eden Project of the North. It was planned as a tourist destination and an education centre about sustainable development. It had the largest solar array of its kind in Europe, when it was built; and its gardens are wonderful now, overgrown into a vision of post-apocalyptic abundance, because the Earth Centre itself turned out not to be sustainable, in some fairly mundane ways. Unable to attract the projected visitor numbers, it closed for the last time in 2004.

    I can’t think about Conisbrough without also remembering the artist Rachel Horne who comes from the town, who was born during the Miner’s Strike and whose dad was a miner. Her work and her life are bound up with the experience of a community for whom the future disappeared. She grew up in a time and a place where the purpose of that small town had gone, because the pit had closed. As she took me around the town, on my first visit, one of the saddest moments came when she pointed out a set of new houses by the railway line. ‘That’s where my dad’s allotment was.’ The allotments were owned by the Coal Board, and so when the pit closed, not only did the men lose their jobs, but also their ability to grow their own food.

    Horne grew up in a school that was in special measures. Her teachers would say to her, ‘you’re smart, keep your head down, get out of here as fast as you can’. She did: when she was sixteen, she left for Doncaster to study for A-levels, and then to London to art school. She was two years into art school when she turned around and went back. The work she was doing only made sense if she could ground it in the place where she had grown up, to work with the people she knew, and make work with them. So she put her degree on hold and came home to work on the first of a series of projects which have inspired me hugely, a project called Out of Darkness, Light, in which she brought her community together to honour the memory of the four hundred men and boys who had died in the history of the Cadeby Main colliery. Led by a deep instinct for what needed to be done, she had found a way back to one of the ancient and enduring functions of art, to honour the dead and, in so doing, give meaning to the living.

    When we talk about ‘collapse’, there is a temptation to imagine a mythological event which lies somewhere out there in the future and which will change everything: The End Of The World As We Know It. But worlds are ending all the time; bodies of knowledge and ways of knowing are passing into memory, and beyond that into the depths of forgetting. For many people in many places, collapse is lived experience, something they have passed through and with which they go on living. What Horne’s work underlines, for me, is the entanglement between the hard, material realities of economic collapse and the subtler devastation wrought by the collapse of meaning. This double collapse is there in the stories of the South Yorkshire coalfields, as in those of the former Soviet Union.

    Yet perhaps there has already been something closer to a universal collapse of meaning, a failure whose consequences are so profound that we have hardly begun to reckon with them. In some sense, ‘the future’ itself has broken.

    Looking back to the 1950s and 60s, I am struck by how, even in a time when people were living under the real threat of Mutually Assured Destruction, the future still occupied such a powerful place within the cultural imagination. It was present in a technological sense – the Jetsons visions of the future which we associate with 1950s America – and in a political sense, a belief in the possibility of a revolution that would change everything and usher in a fairer society. Or, on a quieter scale, in the creation of communities oriented around a utopian vision of making a better world.

    Somewhere along the way, the future seems to have disappeared, without very much comment. It doesn’t occupy the place in mainstream culture which it did forty or fifty years ago. You can look for pivots, moments at which it began to go. The fall of the Soviet Union might be one, in a sense. ‘The End of History’ was one of the famous aggrandising labels attached to those events, but perhaps ‘The End of the Future’ would be closer to the truth? Or are we dealing with another consequence of the political and cultural hopes which hinged on the events of 1968?

    Perhaps it is simpler than that. If we no longer have daydreams about retiring to Mars, is it not least because fewer and fewer people are confident that retirement is still going to be there as a social phenomenon in most of our countries, by the time we reach that age? When students take to the streets of Paris or London today, it is no longer to bring about a better world, but to defend what they can of the world their parents took for granted.

    So if the future is broken, how do we go about mending it? How do were-member it, gather the pieces and put them back together? Like all griefs, the journey cannot be completed without a letting-go.

    Where traces of the future remain in our mainstream culture, it is as a source of anxiety, something to be distracted from. When we, as environmentalists, talk about the future, it is often in language such as ‘We have fifty months to save the planet.’ One reason I am suspicious of this way of framing our situation is that it is so clearly haunted by a desire for certainty, and for knowing, and (by implication) the control which knowledge promises. Whereas the hardest thing about the future is that it is unknown, that history does humble us, that people often fail to anticipate the events which end up shaping their lives, on a domestic or a global scale. This isn’t an argument for ignoring what we can see about the seriousness of the situation we are in, but it is an invitation to seek a humbler relationship with the future, and to be aware of the points at which our language acts as a defence against our uncertainties. It seems to me that such a historical humility may help us navigate the difficult years ahead, and perhaps begin the process of recovering from the cultural bereavement which our societies have gone through in recent decades.

    When I get up from my writing and go to the balcony of this small flat, I can see on the horizon to the north the strange landmark of the Atomium, a remnant of the World Fair held here in Brussels over half a century ago. Such structures exist in an eery superimposition, relics of a future which didn’t happen. Nothing dates faster than yesterday’s idea of tomorrow. It is remote in a way which the most mysterious and illegible prehistoric remains are not, because they were once part of the lives of people more or less like ourselves. And while it is possible that your parents or grandparents were among the hundreds of thousands who, in the summer of 1958, queued to visit the abandoned future which graces this city’s skyline, they could do so only as tourists. Those huge atomic globes have never been anyone’s sanctuary or home.

    The future to which such monuments are erected has little to do with the direction history is likely to take. It represents, rather, an attempt by those who hold power in the present to project themselves, to announce their inevitability in the face of the arbitrariness of history. It is a doomed colonial move, as foolish as those rulers who from time to time have sent their armies against the sea. However confidently they set their faces to the horizon, their feet rest uneasily on the ground. History will make fools of them, too, sooner or later, arriving from an unexpected direction.

    Paul Celan knew this, when he wrote:

    Into the rivers north of the future
    I cast out the net, that you
    hesitantly burden with stone-engraved shadows.

    One direction from which I have begun to find help in remembering the future is the practice of improvisation.

    To understand this, it may help to start with words, to pull words to pieces in order to put them back together. ‘To provide’ is to have foresight. The word improvisation is very close to the word ‘improvident’, and to be improvident is not to have looked ahead and made provision. ‘To improvise’ turns that around, into something positive, because improvisation is the skill of acting without knowing what is coming next, of being comfortable with the unknown, with uncertainty, with unpredictability.

    I have come to see improvisation as the deep skill and attitude which we need for the times that we’re already in and heading further into. Part of the truth of how climate change, for example, will play out at the level where we actually live our lives is through increased unpredictability. Less able to rely on processes and systems which we have taken for granted, we are confronted by our lack of control. This will throw us acute practical challenges, but also – as in the coalfield communities of Rachel Horne’s life and work – the challenge of holding our sense of meaning together in times of drastic change.

    When you consider the history of improvisation, you encounter something like a paradox. Because it is arguably the basic human skill, the thing that we are good at. It is what we have been doing for tens of thousands of years, over meals and around camp fires, in the marketplace, the tea house or the pub. Every conversation you have is an improvisation: words are coming out of your mouth which you didn’t plan or script or anticipate. And yet we are accustomed to thinking of improvisation as a specialist skill, a kind of social tightrope-walking; this magic of being able to perform, to draw meaning from thin air, to make people laugh or make them think without having had it all written out beforehand.

    Our fear of improvisation is, at least in part, a result of what industrial societies have been like and what they have done to us. I want to offer the distinction between ‘improvisation’ and ‘orchestration’ as two different principles by which people come together and do things. In these terms, we could talk about the industrial era as having been peculiarly dominated by orchestration.

    Orchestration is the mode of organisation in which great amounts of effort are synchronised, coordinated and harnessed to the control of a single will. At the simplest physical level, picture the large orchestras of the nineteenth century: the coordinated movements of a first violin section are not so different to the coordinated movements of workers in a factory. The position of the conductor standing on the podium is not so different to the position of the politicians, democratic or otherwise, of the industrial era, addressing unprecedented numbers of people through new technologies which make it possible for one voice to be amplified far beyond its true reach.

    The same shift away from improvisation can be seen in the basic activities of buying and selling. Think of the marketplace, a space in which economic activity is tangled up with all kinds of other sociable activities, a place for telling stories, hearing songs, catching up on news, eating, drinking, meeting members of the opposite sex (or members of the same sex). The social practices of buying and selling in the marketplace are themselves full of sociable performance. Haggling is not only a means of coming to a price, it is a playful encounter, a moment of improvisation. From there, swing to the opposite extreme, the huge department-store windows of the later nineteenth century, their shock-and-awe spectacle before which all one can do is stand silent, mouth open; just as, for the first time, it had become the convention that an audience would sit in silence in the theatre, a silence which would have been unimaginable to Shakespeare.

    The story of the industrial era can be told as the story of a time in which orchestration paid off, allowing us to produce more stuff and to solve real problems. Of course, there were always challenges to be made, and around the edges we find the other stories of those who challenged the dehumanisation, the liquidation of social and cultural fabric, the counterproductivity and the ecological destruction. (Set these against the changes in life expectancy and infant mortality over the same generations, and perhaps the only human response is a refusal to draw up accounts; an assertion of the incommensurability of reality, of the need to ‘hold everything dear’.)

    What we can say is that, increasingly, even within our industrial societies and the places to which they have brought us, the pay-offs of orchestration are breaking down. Systems become more complex and unstable; it becomes less effective to project the will of one person or of a central decision-making process through huge numbers of others. Under such circumstances, improvisation – the old skill edged out by the awesome machinery of Progress – may be returning from the margins.

    There is another thread here, concerning time – time and desire – which could help us draw together this story of orchestration and improvisation with the question of the broken future.

    Since I began talking and writing about the failure of the future, I have noticed two kinds of response, which might broadly be identified as a postmodern and a retro-modern attitude. The first shrugs ironically, ‘Worry about it later!’ A hyperreal refuge-taking in the present, in a consumer reality where styles of every time and period are mashed together with no reference to the history or the culture which produced them, in one seemingly endless now. Against this, there emerges a second, more alarmed attitude, which manifests as a kind of nostalgic modernism; a desire to reinstate the future as a thing which can inspire us, which can be a vessel for our hopes.

    However desperately, sincerely or cynically they are held, it seems to me that neither of these attitudes will do. They are not up to the situation in which we find ourselves. So where else do we turn? One route to another attitude may be to say that the role of the future which characterised the modern era was never satisfactory. There was something already wrong with it. Yes, it has broken down – and the fact that people just don’t like to think about the future is part of what makes it difficult for us to motivate and inspire others to do the things we know need doing, if we’re to limit the damage we are going to live through. But the answer is not a return to the heroic striving towards the future which structured the ideologies of industrial modernity. Because that was already twisted, a tearing out of shape of time, that could only end badly.

    Another story we could tell about the age of industrial modernity, of capitalism and the changing culture in which it flourished, is the story of the loss of timeliness. Max Weber saw the origins of this economic culture in the Protestant work ethic, a new emphasis on hard work and frugality as proof of salvation.3 Historians have questioned his account, but in broader terms, the journey to the world as we know it has been marked by shifts away from the sensuous and the specific, towards the abstract and exchangeable; and one of the axes along which this has taken place is our relationship to time. Not least, the shift from a world of seasonal festivals to a world of Sabbath observance marked a new detachment from the living, sensuous cycles surrounding us. (The replacement of the festive calendar with the weekly cycle also happened to offer the factory owner a more consistent return on his capital.) With this detachment from rhythm and season, there was also a loss of that sense which surfaces in the Book of Ecclesiastes, that there is a time for everything:

    a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,

    a time to search and a time to give up,
    a time to keep and a time to throw away,

    a time to tear and a time to mend,
    a time to be silent and a time to speak,

    a time to love and a time to hate,
    a time for war and a time for peace.

    Ecclesiastes 3:5-8

    This contextual, rhythmic sense of our place in the world gives way to a preference for abstract, absolute principles. The universalism which was always strong in monotheistic traditions is now let fully off the leash of lived experience, engendering new kinds of rigidity and intolerance (though also the progressive universalism which will drive, for example, the movement to abolish slavery).

    Following the line of this story, we could see the history of capitalism as a history of the contortion of the relationship between time and desire. In its earlier form, to be a good economic citizen is to work hard today for a deferred reward; the repressive morality we associate with the Victorian era is then a cultural manifestation of this perpetually-deferred gratification. To push this further, perhaps the cultural upheavals of the second half of the twentieth century represent a similar knock-on effect of the lurch from producer to consumer capitalism? In the countries of the post-industrial West, to be a good economic citizen is now to spend on your credit card today and worry how you’ll pay for it later. Despite the glimpses of freedom as we pivoted from one contortion to the other, desire remains harnessed to the engine of ever-expanding GDP; only, we have switched from the gear of deferred gratification to that of instant gratification.

    The cultural experiment of debt-fuelled consumption appears to be already entering its endgame. When its costs are finally counted, perhaps the loss of the future which we have been retracing will be listed among them?

    Whatever stories we tell, each of them is only one route across a landscape. Some routes are wiser than others, and some are older than memory. As we turn for home, let us find our way by an old story.

    Of all the figures in Greek myth, few seemed more at home in the era of industrial modernity than Prometheus. The ingenious Titan who stole fire from the gods stood as an icon of the technological leap into the future. Once again, words themselves are full of clues. Prometheus means ‘forethought’. He has a brother, whose name is Epimetheus, meaning ‘afterthought’, or hindsight. The figure of the fool, stumbling backwards, not knowing where he is going. His foolishness is confirmed when he insists, despite the warnings of Prometheus, on accepting Pandora as a gift from the gods, and with her the famous jar. And so, the story goes, came all the evils into the world. It is a deeply misogynist story; but we are not at the bottom of it. Dwelling on the name, Pandora, ‘The All-Giver’, there is the suggestion of an older path, a deeper level at which Pandora is not simply another slandered Eve, but an embodiment of nature’s abundance and our belonging within its generous embrace.v

    The name of Epimetheus may long ago have been eclipsed by that of his forward-looking brother, but there is one great, unnamed, high modern icon made in his image; the figure conjured up in the ninth of Walter Benjamin’s theses on the philosophy of history:

    A Klee drawing named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling ruin upon ruin and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

    ‘On the Concept of History’ (1940)

    Written in the shadow of the Second World War, this is the tragic obverse of modernity’s idolisation of the future; to look backwards is always to have hindsight, and hindsight is forever useless.

    But perhaps there is more to hindsight than Benjamin’s dark vision allows. Those who practice improvisation talk about the importance of looking backwards. Keith Johnstone, one of the founders of modern theatrical improvisation, writes powerfully about improvisation as an attitude to life, a mode of navigating reality. In one passage, he describes the kind of wise foolishness which it takes to improvise a story, in strikingly Epimethean terms:

    The improviser has to be like a man walking backwards. He sees where he has been, but he pays no attention to the future. His story can take him anywhere, but he must still ‘balance’ it, and give it shape, by remembering incidents that have been shelved and reincorporating them. Very often an audience will applaud when earlier material is brought back into the story. They couldn’t tell you why they applaud, but the reincorporation does give them pleasure.

    Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre

    There is a deep satisfaction at the moment when something from earlier in the story is woven back in, for the listener and for the storyteller. In that moment, another dimension emerges, beyond the arbitrariness of linear time, and we sense the embrace of the cyclical. There is the feeling of pattern and meaning, of things coming together. The ritual has worked.

    If Johnstone’s account of the craft of improvisation echoes with the footsteps of Epimetheus, in Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society he is invoked by name. In the closing chapter of his great critique of the counterproductivity of our education systems, Illich looks towards ‘The Dawn of Epimethean Man’. The Promethean spirit of homo faber has taken us to the moon, but that was the easy part; the challenge is to find our way home, to find each other again across the aching distances our technologies have created.

    Illich reminds his readers of the sequel to the myth. Epimetheus stays with Pandora, and their daughter Pyrrha goes on to marry Deucalion, the son of Prometheus. When an angered Zeus sends an earth-drowning deluge, it is Deucalion and Pyrrha who build an ark and survive to repeople the land. Writing in 1970, Illich could find resonance in this idea of a union of the Promethean and Epimethean attitudes, carrying humanity through a time of ecological disaster. Forty years on, perhaps the symmetry simply seems too neat to hold such weight.

    And yet, in practical terms, I think that there may be some fragments of truth here. What gets us through the times ahead may well be those moments when we look backwards and find something from earlier in the story that we can pull through, that becomes useful again. Our leaders are very fond of talking about ‘innovation’, the point at which some new device enters social reality; we don’t seem to have an equivalent word for when things that are old-fashioned, obsolete and redundant come into their own in the hour of need. (I think of the knights in shining armour sleeping under the hill in the Legend of Alderley, as told by Alan Garner’s grandfather, and in so many other folk stories.) I think we may need such a word, because as the systems we grew up depending on become less reliable, we will find ourselves drawing on things that worked in other times and places.

    There is another clue here as to why official projections of the future date so quickly. If you want to imagine what the future is going to be like, it is a mistake to assume that it will be populated by the products, tools and systems which look most ‘futuristic’, or those most marvellously optimised for present circumstances. These are the things which have been tested against the narrowest range of possible times and places. The supermarket, for example, has been with us for two generations. On the other hand, the sociable, improvisational marketplace has endured through an extraordinary range of times and places. Almost anywhere that human beings have lived in significant numbers, there have been meeting points where people come together to trade, to share news, to exchange goods, to make decisions. Just now, it may survive as a luxury phenomenon, a place to buy hand-crafted cheeses and organic vegetables. Yet the cheaper prices in Tesco this year do not cancel out the suspicion that the marketplace will continue to exist in any number of quite imaginable futures, where today’s globe-spanning systems become too expensive and unreliable to sustain the supermarket business model.

    Whether we like it or not, we must live with the unknowability of the future, its capacity to humble us and take us by surprise, our inability to control it. This need not be a source of despair, nor is the choice simply between the hyperreal distractions of postmodernity and an effort to reignite the process of Progress. There is inspiration to be found in our own foolishness, stumbling backwards, muddling through, relearning the craft of making it up as we go along; cooking from the ingredients to hand, rather than starting with a recipe. If the collapse of meaning is as much of a threat as the material realities of economic and ecological collapse, not least because it debilitates us when we need all our resilience to handle those realities, then the art of finding meaning in the weaving together of past and future is not a luxury. Meanwhile, the spirit of Epimetheus should inspire us to treat the past not as an object of romantic fantasy, but nor as a dustbin of discarded prototypes. Learning how people have made life work in other times and places is one way of readying ourselves for the unknown territory north of the future, in which all our expectations may be confounded.

    After all the evils of the world, one thing is left at the bottom of Pandora’s jar: hope. As Illich comments, hope is not the same as expectation. It is not optimism, or a plan. It’s not knowing what’s going to happen. But it is an attitude which enables you to keep taking one step after another into the unknown.

    Johnstone never makes explicit reference to Epimetheus, but at the very end of his handbook on improvisation, he recounts three short dreams, the kind that ‘announce themselves as messages’. The last of these seems particularly familiar, like a name that is on the tip of everyone’s tongue:

    There is a box that we are forbidden to open. It contains a great serpent and once opened this monster will stream out forever. I lift the lid, and for a moment it seems as if the serpent will destroy us; but then it dissipates into thin air, and there, at the bottom of the box, is the real treasure.

  • Sensing and Knowing with David Abram

    Sensing and Knowing with David Abram

  • Zen and the Art of ‘How To’ Lists

    While I was building my new website, I developed a fascination with ‘How To’ lists.

    A couple of things struck me: (1) the ‘How To’ is a deeply underrated learning technology and (2) the way the internet has picked up on ‘How To’s may not be doing justice to them.

    To explain, I need to tell you about magic and about an email magazine which I used to edit.

    The email was called ‘Pick Me Up’. The traces of it have almost disappeared from the web now, but it ran for 100 issues between 2004 and 2006. It came out on a Friday afternoon and our aim was to inspire you to do something more interesting than check your inbox on a Friday afternoon

    Our motto was: “Think what you would do if only you had the money, then work out how you can do it anyway.” (You might say this was the first formulation of the Big Society, but please don’t blame us.)

    A Pick Me Up story had to be about making something happen. You told the story in a way that meant someone else could use and adapt what you had learned. Many of the classic Pick Me Up stories were “How To” guides – how to organise your own festival, how to become a pickpocket, how to write a love letter.

    Now, as I was putting my site together, I suddenly felt the need to balance out the enormous reading list with something more practical – in the same way that the talking and writing side of my work is balanced by going out and making things happen.

    So I started to dig out some of my old Pick Me Up articles – and some of the other great “How To” lists I’ve come across, from Ran Prieur’s How to Drop Out, to Bill Drummond’s How to have a Number One hit (the easy way), to my friend Matt’s How to start a meetup.

    Pretty soon, I had a new How To page for the site, full of DIY advice for living well and making things happen.

    Why stop there, I thought? Wouldn’t it be great to see if I can collect some of the other classic Pick Me Up stories – and maybe I could invite other people to suggest their own ‘How To’ lists?

    I like the idea of encouraging people to document and share the simplest things they’ve learned from life and work in the simplest format possible – “X steps for how to…” – and presenting it not as a formula to be applied meticulously, but as something like dance notation or a chord progression for improvising from.

    At this point, I remembered – there are loads of websites that already do this. (Just the other week, I’d used eHow to learn how to fix a sash window.) What was the point in my puny little list, set alongside these user-generated encyclopedias of how?

    I knew there had to be a point, though – and after a while it came to me.

    You see, the ‘How To’ list is a deceptively simple thing. The subtlety is all in the bits that can’t be written down. (In this sense, it’s the opposite of a poem: to get a better understanding of a poem, you look at the words harder, whereas with a ‘How To’ you look at the gaps.)

    This is the story of the Sorceror’s Apprentice: if you try to do a spell by following the book alone, it will go wrong. A ‘How To’ (or a recipe, or a musical score) is not a computer program, a full and flawless record of a process which can be mechanically applied. To make it work, you probably need to bring your own experience and judgement to the task.

    And spells are not a bad metaphor for a good ‘How To’. An old word for a book of spells is a “grimoire”, which means grammar.

    Once out of formal education, you rarely meet a situation in which there is a single right answer. As you work in a particular craft, though, you begin to assemble a grammar of the kinds of reality with which you work. (This is as true for a novelist as for a boat builder.)

    Whatever shorthand you use to record or talk about this cannot capture all the wordless knowledge involved in your practice. With care, though, it should be possible to record enough to be useful to others, if they use it with care.

    The thing about this kind of knowledge is, its provenance matters. The difference between the vastness of eHow and my humble How To page is the difference between looking at an enormous jumble of tools and looking at the contents of a particular craftsman’s toolkit. I’m not claiming to be a great craftsman, but what I’m doing with that page is beginning to open source what I have learned so far about the craft of making things happen.

    I can think of lots of other people whose grimoires I’d like to see – so I’m hoping this post might inspire them to write and share some of their own How To lists, or the ones they have found helpful. (Maybe post them on your own blog and leave a comment here?)

    I’m also hosting a session on this theme at tomorrow morning’s School of Everything: Unplugged, so if you’re in London and free on a Wednesday morning, come and have a go at writing your own How To lists with us.