DOUGALD HINE

Author: Dougald Hine

  • Dark Mountain: The Online Edition

    Dark Mountain: The Online Edition

    So many of my working hours in the first half of 2018 went into the new Dark Mountain website. It was a strange experience to have it “go live” while I was offline and away from work of all kinds last month. But also appropriate, a reminder that there are others who will take this project forwards.

    I got back to my desk two weeks ago – and it’s taken most of that time to steady myself, to find the balance between the things that came into focus while I was away and the things that were still waiting here on my return. But I think I’m getting there.

    Meanwhile, if you haven’t found it already, let me share the site with you. It’s by no means finished – if there’s one thing I learned over the past year, it’s that no website is ever “finished”. But already, I think, it fulfils two of the ambitions with which we set out: to create an online home for our work that approaches the beauty of the books we publish, and to go back and tell the stories of the work we’ve done over what will soon be a decade as a project. I hope you agree.

    Oh yes – and to celebrate me finally getting round to trumpeting the news of its launch, today we’ve published Childish Things, my essay on the ways that art gets tangled up with the sacred (originally written for last year’s SANCTUM issue).

  • Embracing Our Dark Reality: Interview with Frontier magazine

    Embracing Our Dark Reality: Interview with Frontier magazine

    We see things in the daylight, but in the night we have dreams and we process the things that we’ve seen and try to make sense of them, try to find a way of weaving them into our knowledge of ourselves and our ideas of ourselves in the world.

    (more…)

  • From the Dead Centre of the Present

    From the Dead Centre of the Present

    It seems that we were following similar hunches, for years, before we were introduced. The crisis of 2008 had set us on these tracks – or rather, it meant that the tracks we were following anyway seemed suddenly relevant to people who hadn’t noticed them before, so that we found ourselves needing to reformulate, to express what it was we thought we had caught sight of.

    In my case, this took the form of Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto, written with Paul Kingsnorth and published in 2009. The hunch that we tried to put into words was that the crisis went deeper than almost anyone wanted to admit, that it went culture deep, that it was a crisis of the stories by which our culture has been living. And if this is true, we thought, then might it not follow that the work of telling stories and making culture becomes central to the task we face, the task of living through dark times and finding possibilities among the ruins.

    The tumbling weeks of crisis turn into months, years, and a new normal establishes itself, but it is never the promised return to normal. Eight years on, Dark Mountain has become a gathering point for people trying to work out what still makes sense, in the face of all we know about the depth of the mess the world is in.

    A mountain is not exactly an urban thing, though! Sometimes I tell people, it’s not a place you live the whole time: it’s a place you go to look back and get a longer perspective, maybe even to receive some kind of revelation, but you still have an everyday life to return to, back in the city or the village. That’s what I enjoy about this friendship and collaboration with STEALTH – and joy is a word that should be mentioned here, you know! I still remember the night we were first brought together for dinner by a mutual friend and we laughed so much all night we said, we have to do this again tomorrow, and we did. That’s how we got tangled up with each other.

    Now, tracing our tangled trajectories across these past eight years – you bouncing between cities, me wandering up and down a mountain of words – I see two stories that we seem to have in common. The first is spatial, the second temporal.

    The spatial story concerns a negotiation between the edges and the centre. I need to be careful how I say this, because we have all been told about the way that whatever is edgy, new, avant-garde gets metabolised, made palatable, made marketable and becomes the next iteration of the centre. That’s the story of selling out, or buying in: the great morality tale of counterculture.

    The story I’m trying to tell, here – the one I say we have in common – starts with the claim that the centre as we know it is already ruined beyond saving. This is what I see in that image of the burnt-out architecture faculty in Delft in ARCHIPHOENIX. In the manifesto that Paul and I wrote, we speak about this: “None of us knows where to look, but all of us know not to look down. Secretly, we all think we are doomed: even the politicians think this; even the environmentalists…” And then we ask, “What would happen if we looked down?” What if we admit that the centre is already a burnt-out ruin? Might we need to ask ourselves what it is, exactly, that is doomed: what version of ourselves, what set of things (structures, institutions, customs) with which we have identified?

    If this is the kind of mess we’re in, then the challenge for those of us at the edges is neither to retain our countercultural purity, nor to negotiate good terms on which to cash in with a centre that is already collapsing – nor even to try to shore that centre up and prevent its collapse (too late!) – but to offer something that could take its place.

    “Sometimes you have to go to the edges to get some perspective on the turmoil at the heart of the things,” writes Paul Kingsnorth, my co-founder in Dark Mountain, in late 2016. “Doing so is not an abnegation of public responsibility: it is a form of it. In the old stories, people from the edges of things brought ideas and understandings from the forest back in the kingdom which the kingdom could not generate by itself.”

    The arrival at the centre of a figure from the edges is the opening move in many an old story. But the negotiation cannot set anything in motion, so long as the pretence is maintained that business can go on as usual, that a return to normal is on the cards.

    So when STEALTH asks how those practices which already showcase possible directions could be “made to work… on a scale that answers the challenges ahead?”, what is in question is not ‘scaling up’ for the sake of profitability, but what might take the place where the centre used to be. How do we find ways of going on making things work when – as in The Report – the all-powerful operating system breaks down. Like Anna Tsing, we are looking for the possibilities of life within capitalist ruins.

    “The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world, full stop,” we write, on the last page of the manifesto. The ruins are not the end of the story. Ecologically, the species present (our species included) go on improvising ways of living together, even with all the damage. There are things to be done: salvage work, grief work, the work of remembering and picking up the dropped threads.

    This is where we slip from the spatial to the temporal. What is at stake in the temporal story is how we find leverage on the dead centre of the present. Not so long ago, the future served as a point of leverage: a place from which to open up a gap between how things happen to be just now and how they might be. That gap was charged with possibility.

    Here I think of the work of Tor Lindstrand, to whom you introduced me in that project in Tensta, ‘Haunted by the Shadows of the Future’. He tells the story of the disappearance of the future in urban planning: the evaporation of any vision or belief in the possibility that things could be different, as the development of cities is subsumed into the operation of the market and marketed with bland identikit images and words. The role of financialisation in this reminds me of William Davies’ description of the consequences of monetary policy under
    neoliberalism:

    The problem with viewing the future as territory to be plundered is that eventually we all have to live there. And if, once there, finding it already plundered, we do the same thing again, we enter a vicious circle. We decline to treat the future as a time when things might be different, with yet to be imagined technologies, institutions and opportunities. The control freaks in finance aren’t content to sit and wait for the future to arrive on its own terms, but intend to profit from it and parcel it out, well before the rest of us have got there.

    If the future is already plundered – and if, as Dark Mountain points out, the consequences of related kinds of plundering for the ecological fabric stand in the way of any revival of the confident future of modernity – how else can we open up that gap in which the possibility of change, the non-inevitability of present conditions, can be located?

    The great improvisation teacher Keith Johnstone says that, when telling a story, you shouldn’t worry about what’s coming next: you should be like a person walking backwards, looking out for the chance to weave back in one of the threads from earlier in the story. We move through time backwards, like Walter Benjamin’s ‘angel of history’: we cannot go back and fix the mistakes of the past, but at least it is there for us to see, in a way that was never true of the future. Ivan Illich writes of ‘the mirror of the past’: if we look carefully into it, without falling into romanticism and without dismissing it as simply a poorer version of the present, then the past too can serve as a source for a sense of possibility. In a time of endings, one of the forms of possibility it offers is the dropped threads of earlier endings – the way of life which is now falling into ruin was built among the ruins of earlier ways of life.

    I see this as central to the method by which you seek to build possible futures, in Bordeaux and Vienna, in Rotterdam and Belgrade, and elsewhere. I remember sitting in a seminar room in Gothenburg as you showed us images of that mutual aid society in the Netherlands in the 1860s, created by workers to build their own homes. A trajectory can be traced from this initiative to the grander state projects for welfare of the mid-20th century, to the hollowing out of those projects under the neoliberal period of marketisation, to the crisis of 2008 in which they are revealed as ruins. Even as you go about improvising practical strategies to bring these ruins to life, you are always looking back to the beginnings of the story and asking what has been lost or written out, in the way that it has been told.

    In THE REPORT, you reveal the pattern by which the role of bottom-up initiatives in the building of the city have been written out of Vienna’s story. What emerges from these researches and the future narratives which they inform is the realisation that, in many parts of Europe, the achievements of social democracy were born out of movements which looked far more like anarcho-syndicalism than those who later consolidated these achievements into top-down state systems would be willing to admit.

    Those movements were born out of necessity, operating within the ruins of the commons, devastated by the early phases of industrial capitalism; now, after 40 years of neoliberalism, as we look for ways to operate within the ruins of the welfare societies of the 20th century, their histories can help us open the gap between how things are and how they might be.

    We meet in the conviction that telling stories is not just a way of passing the time, but the way that we find our bearings in the world. A story opens a space of possibility into which we can invite others and when the work of building new projects among the ruins is at its hardest, when we wonder if it is worth going on, it is by retelling the stories that we connect ourselves to the past and the future, place ourselves within time. The right story, told from the heart, can be the difference between going on and giving up.

    First published in Upscaling, Training, Commoning (Jovis, 2018), a book by the Dutch-Serbian architecture duo STEALTH.unlimited.

  • The Consequences of Unacknowledged Loss

    The village is full of memories, scenes that loop in the minds of these four characters, setting in motion the events of Mayfly. In lots of other ways, the village is empty: there are no kids anymore, the pub is closing down, the pigs on the farm were sold off years ago.

    As I start to list these losses, I hear another voice, a memory from somewhere else: ‘Surely you agree that it’s a good thing that we don’t all have to work on the land anymore?’

    It was New Year’s Eve, a long way to go till midnight, and the conversation had taken a wrong turning. I’d made the mistake of trying to explain the book that I was writing. It made no sense to him: how could I not see that history was headed in the right direction? He had a PhD in political science and a job in a government ministry. From where we were sitting, in a desirable neighbourhood of a European capital city, the arc of progress looked obvious and undeniable.

    I thought of an afternoon, ten years earlier, when I’d sat at the kitchen table of a farmhouse in South Yorkshire. The press release that brought me there was cheerily worded, sent out by an organisation that gave out grants to support rural entrepreneurship. The producer thought it would make a piece for the Saturday breakfast show: ‘Meet the farmer who’s swapped cows for cats!’ His wife showed me round the new cattery, a holiday home for the pets of nearby townies, but as we arrived in the kitchen, I was faced with a man in deep grief. When the dairy herd had gone, the silence nearly killed him. The farm that had been his life was an empty shell. For a month, he said, he couldn’t sleep indoors: the only thing that worked was to go out and lie on the grass.

    History is an accumulation of changes, playing out through lifetimes and across generations. Among them, there are changes which no sane person would wish away: who wants to forego antibiotics or anaesthetic dentistry? We could each add to that list. History is made up of gains as well as losses. Sometimes it is easy to say which is which. Sometimes it depends on where you’re sitting.

    There is a dream of a standpoint from which it would be possible to settle the accounts of history, to weigh all these gains and losses against each other, to say whether we are up or down from year to year. No such standpoint exists. Even where we agree on the gains and losses, they do not balance like numbers in a table. For the purposes of national population statistics, the death of your father and the birth of your son may cancel each other out, but this statistical fact bears no relation to the reality which you or anyone will experience.

    Just now, we seem to be dealing with the consequences of a great deal of unacknowledged loss. For years, the number of people whose experience bore little relation to the stories of progress told by politicians had been growing. When surveys showed rising fears for the future, these were reported with barely concealed scorn, for the long-term trends in GDP showed the slow miracle of economic growth to be unstoppable. When loss goes ungrieved, it doesn’t go away, it festers. Out of this may come dark eruptions, events declared impossible by people with PhDs in political science, sitting in the desirable neighbourhoods of capital cities.

    That New Year’s conversation took place on the last evening of 2015. Twelve months later, maybe it would have had a different flavour. We have seen the rise of political movements which appeal to an imagined past, promising to recover a lost greatness. Against this, there are those who want to double down on progress. Public intellectuals publish books the size of bricks which prove with statistics that things have never been better. Others acknowledge that something has gone badly wrong and ask how we can recover the kind of collective faith in the future which took men to the moon and built the welfare state.

    Well, perhaps another attitude is called for. Perhaps we need room to do the work of grieving. Not to write off the losses of the past, nor to romanticise them. Not to pretend that they can be recovered. Grief changes us, calls our stories into question. It can sharpen our sense of what matters. The journey it leads us on is seldom pretty, but it cannot be headed off with calls to optimism, or cost-benefit analyses proving our losses are outweighed within the greater scheme of things.

    There is plenty of loss in the village where we find ourselves. It can take people to the edge of humiliation, or self-destruction, or mistaken identity. But none of this need be the end of the story.

    First published in the programme for the Orange Tree Theatre production of Joe White’s Mayfly.

  • Extending the Glide: A Conversation with Jem Bendell

    I first met Professor Jem Bendell at a festival in the middle of a Swedish forest. This was back around the beginning of the 2010s, and he wasn’t a professor in those days, and to be honest we didn’t find that much in common.

    The festival was called Future Perfect. The organisers had brought together sustainability thinkers, ecologically-minded designers, organic food entrepreneurs and a whole smorgasbord of buzzwords. At several points, I was provoked into forceful interventions, which led to the invention of the role of ‘difficultator’ – a kind of anti-facilitator or heckler-in-residence – in which capacity they invited me back the following year.

    My impression of Jem from that event was of a big NGO, sustainable development, Corporate Social Responsibility guy. He was living in Geneva, working as a consultant to the UN. He’d done things: the Marine Stewardship Council was one of his projects, and he’d been in at the beginning of the UN Global Compact. He was all about getting big business to drive sustainability. He struck me as driven, ambitious, serious, but I didn’t get much sense of someone wrestling with the existential implications of the mess in which we find ourselves. And fair play, he was too busy for that.

    So it came as a surprise when we crossed paths again last year and he told me that Dark Mountain had been much on his mind. I’d been aware of the ripples made by a keynote that he had given at a climate change conference in Australia, setting out an agenda for what he calls Deep Adaptation, based around the three ‘R’s of Resilience, Relinquishment and Restoration. It’s been picked up in places like the Planet B festival in Peterborough last summer and a forthcoming season of events at the NewBridge Project in Newcastle – while Charlotte Du Cann wrote about it in the call for submissions for the next Dark Mountain book.

    When I caught up with Jem over Skype a few weeks ago, I mentioned that I’d been struck by how far he had travelled since our first meeting, so I was curious to know what had set him on that journey.

    JB: I gave my inaugural professorial talk in March 2014 at a big literary festival in Cumbria. I’d already become aware of some of the latest science on climate change, so I decided to frame sustainability as an adventure – to say that we have to let go of our incremental, non-ambitious, conformist approaches. I gave a speech about that, because it was a frame that could be palatable to my colleagues, my employer, my academia and my audience. But I was coming down with the flu during the speech. And for the week after, I was in bed ill.

    There’s something emotional about a conclusion – that’s what you do in an inaugural lecture, you try and synthesise twenty years of your work, and by summarising, you’re also concluding it. So I spent that week in bed, with a fever, not doing much apart from reading scientific papers and watching traumatising videos from the Arctic. And I actually went into despair.

    It took years before I became more deliberate and public about this, and in a way it’s taken me until now to realise that I’ve been going through a professional catharsis which goes back to March 2014.

    DH: I read a piece that you wrote for openDemocracy later that year, arguing that the mainstream debate around climate change had become detached from the facts that were now coming in from the science. You highlight four different conversations going on around the edges which you say have more to do with the reality of where we find ourselves, one of which is a conversation you identify with the radical end of Transition Towns, the work of people like Charles Eisenstein, as well as with Dark Mountain.

    JB: The reason I wrote that article was that after the experience I’d had that year, I couldn’t help but have conversations with friends about this topic, and I found that I just left people sort of staring into space with their jaws wide open. So I wanted to give them something that would help them think things through, and then they could end up with whichever of those agendas that I mapped out in the piece – and working on any of those agendas would be better than the mainstream denial of how things are.

    DH: That brings me to the speech where you presented what you call the Deep Adaptation agenda. Can you say a bit about how you arrived at that framing?

    JB: Looking back over the last few years, I didn’t really know what to do about this realisation that we can’t fix climate change, that so much of the impact for our civilisation is already locked in. I didn’t know how to work on that. And I realised that one of the reasons was the lack of a framework to get your head around all this. So I thought it might be useful to come up with a map for people who are climate experts, policymakers, researchers about what this might mean. A map that would sound approachable, but would actually be the thin end of a wedge, in terms of where it would take them.

    This coincided with an invitation to a place in Australia where I used to work, Griffith University. It was the tenth anniversary of their centre and they invited me to give the keynote. They are at the centre of the climate change adaptation network of Australia, so they had hundreds of climate change policymakers coming from across the country, and researchers and academics. And I couldn’t justify flying down there and just giving a speech about, you know, the latest great ideas about investment in solar, and so on.

    I was a bit scared, because I knew the guy who was organising the conference and I knew he’d want me to be dynamic. Everyone who’s organising a conference wants to be upbeat – and suddenly the keynote person is going to give a speech about the end of the world, or that’s how it might come across, anyway.

    It was a bit of a coming out. Standing in front of these climate experts who work with this all day and saying: well, this is my reality, this is what I’m struggling with, and this is a map that I have that I think we could use to work on it.

    I called it Deep Adaptation. I introduced the three ‘R’s: Resilience, Relinquishment and Restoration.

    DH: So this is where you’re trying to say, OK, what kind of stuff is worth working on, if you start from climate change as an unfolding tragedy, rather than as a problem that can be fixed and made to go away. Can you just elaborate on what falls within each of those three spheres?

    JB: Sure, well the first one – Resilience – I chose because it’s so mainstream already in the adaptation field. Even in the business schools and the sustainability field, the term resilience had become popular. Because businesses have been experiencing, through their supply chains in particular, disturbances and disruptions through weather events correlated with climate change. But I talked about resilience in a deeper sense than just, ‘How do we diversify our suppliers so that if one gets knocked out by a hurricane, we’ve still got something else?’ So for example, I was talking in a hall which was next to the Brisbane River, which had had flood water lapping at its doors just a year previously – and I pointed out that the place had been refurbished with the electric sockets still near the ground. We need to think again, to switch our mind-sets. These once-in-a-century events will be happening every five years, so resilience needs to wake up to that.

    That brings you into Relinquishment which is about not just, how do we preserve what we want to preserve, but what do we need to let go of? Because if we don’t let go of it, we’ll make matters worse. And I felt that the discourse of sustainability would have seen that previously as peculiar and defeatist – and I wanted to say that, we’re going to have to let a whole lot of things go, ways of life, cultural patterns. You know, in that room we were all wearing suits with ironed shirts and ties, with blasting air con. There are patterns of behaviour which we have to let go of – and I thought, give it a fancy name and you recode it as something interesting, rather than defeatist.

    Then the third one, Restoration – again, it exists already, with people talking about the restorative dimension of environmentalism, restoring ecosystems. Not just stopping the damage, but improving things. But for me, I wasn’t saying that in terms of how we can fix everything, but that you rewild because it is going to happen anyway and you build that into your thinking. But it’s also about restoration in terms of how did people have joy, fun and love, and wonder, celebration and meaning, prior to this hydrocarbon civilisation?

    So Resilience is ‘how do we keep what we really want to keep?’, Relinquishment is ‘what do we need to let go of?’ and Restoration is ‘what can we bring back to help us through this?’

    DH: So you said you were nervous in the run-up to that speech. What kind of reaction did you get?

    JB: I was surprised and delighted at the warm round of applause and the things people were saying to me afterwards. I remember one lady came up to me and said she used to be a pilot in the Outback of Australia and in her training, they used to do quite a spooky exercise which was called ‘extend the glide’. And it’s about, if the aircraft has a problem with the engines and they cut out, how do you then extend the glide to just give yourself more time to find yourself a safer place for the crash landing, but also on the off-chance that the engines might kick in again. And she said, that’s what you’re inviting us to start working on: how do we extend the glide?

    There were other people coming up to me and what I understood was that they had already been talking about these things in their own ways, making sense of it, but not really in their day-jobs, despite being paid to be environmental professionals.

    DH: How has this changed the work you’re doing – that experience of despair and catharsis that you described, going back to 2014, and then creating a framework for those who want to work with this professionally – where has that taken you in the years since?

    JB: Well, in 2017 it took me into politics, writing speeches for Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, because it seems to me that we need a cultural shift towards compassion and a spiritual awakening, an awakening from the delusion of materialism. We don’t see much of that in politics, but Corbyn was saying something similar in a secular way.

    Meanwhile, I decided to approach education in a very different way, as a sort of emancipation from your received assumptions and received wisdom, as a preparation for people to be able to approach these very disturbing and troubling times. But also to see it as an amazing – it’s kind of crazy to say, isn’t it – an amazing opportunity for reflection into the true meaning of being alive. Because climate change is holding up a severe mirror to our consciousness: it means we have to really ask why we are here. Because somehow, we delay that question, and now we can’t.

    So on the one hand, I see that I’ve been doing quite a lot of stuff that I’m OK with that flows from that point in 2014, but I also realise that part of this has been getting busy in order to distract myself, because I didn’t have a good way of living with this knowledge. My sense of self-worth as a good guy, working hard, becoming an expert, becoming a professor – along the way, I made sacrifices in order to achieve that, and then suddenly I had a loss of a sense of self-worth, my role, my identity in life. So I think quite a bit of what I’ve been doing over the past years has been reconstituting a sense of self.

    So thank you for inviting me to talk about this, because it made me reflect in the last few days, and I realise that maybe it’s useful to share this. Because this cathartic process that I went through, some of it conscious and some of it actually only making sense to me looking back, is perhaps something that other people will go through and need to go through. And maybe it’s something we can go through together and help each other.

    I guess I’ve gone through a grieving process and now I realise that it was pretty damn obvious that I will die, everyone I know will die, any community or culture I could ever contribute to will die out, this human species will die out, and the Earth and everything on it will die – well, that’s just obvious, we all knew that, anyway.

    DH: Yes, all of those things were true before the great hydrocarbon episode in humanity’s history. Arriving at that is an important part of the journey of making sense of what it means to be alive right now.

    JB: I feel free of some forms of delusion, some forms of social pressure, and I am approaching things with fascination and playfulness. And what I didn’t have over the past few years were fellow travellers and community, and now I’m realising that I do need a community around this very realisation that we’ve been talking about. And what will emerge from that, I don’t know, but there will be love within it, there will be creativity within it, there will be a sense of wonder at being alive at this incredibly strange moment in human history.

    This conversation with Jem Bendell was published on Dark Mountain’s Online Edition in March 2019, four months prior to the publication of the Deep Adaptation paper.

  • a school called HOME

    Together, we will redraw the maps, steering by the wild stars and the wisdom of many times and places, cultivating the courage which it takes to come alive in times like these.

    We’d talked about it for years, since we began making a life together: the idea of creating some kind of convivial institution, a gathering place for the conversations and collaborations that start around our kitchen table. In early 2018, Anna and I began to put this into practice, making an invitation to Finding Our Way Home, the first residential course at a school called HOME.

    Since my departure from Dark Mountain in 2019, along with my writing, HOME has been my main project. Unlike the organisations I created in my early thirties, there’s no rush here. This is something we’re committed to for as long as it takes, or as long as we’ve got.

    As of the summer of 2020, we’re still looking for a long-term place to call HOME, a permanent base for the school. But we’ve also been learning a lot about how to take this work online, as we build an ongoing community of people who are drawn to the work of regrowing a living culture.

  • Introducing a school called HOME

    Introducing a school called HOME

    Well, it’s not a “school of everything” – and it doesn’t promise to be the future of the university. But a lot of heart has gone into this little school that we’re launching today. And I’ve never felt more grounded, bringing a project out into the world, than doing it alongside Anna.

    Our first course runs from 4-8 June – and you can read the invitation that we’re making on the school website.

    If something in that invitation that we’re making speaks to you, then get in touch soon, as places are already filling up for our first course in June. And if there’s someone you think of when you read it, then pass it in their direction.

    This isn’t just about filling places on a course, it’s about growing a community and creating a home for the invisible college that has sustained our work over the years. Thanks to all of you who have been and continue to be a part of that.

  • It’s Time to Start a School

    An hour’s drive northwest from here, you take a turning off the two-lane highway, near the bottom of a steep hill. After that, you’re on an unpaved road, heading into the woods. At first, there are red wooden houses dotted to either side, but then the scattered township thins out and for the last couple of miles, there’s just you and the trees, a glimpse of lake somewhere off to the left, and this single-track road.

    I’m doing my best, but it’s hard to reproduce the unexpectedness of what comes next. When I bring people here, however much I’ve told them, there’s always an audible expression of amazement as we round the last corner and this huge white Bauhaus structure comes inexplicably into view. It gets better, because as we park and climb out, the newcomers peer through the glass in disbelief, starting to make out a building within a building: the old red wooden schoolhouse, two storeys high, which served as the first home for the gang of theatremakers who dreamed this madness into being, still stands where it always did, inside one wing of the new structure.

    Back in November, the day after I turned forty, this is where we came. Eight grownups and two small kids, cars slithering down the icy road: a little gang of friends and collaborators who had taken up my invitation to spend a weekend at the impossible theatre in the woods, thinking about the years ahead and what we might do together.

    The idea didn’t arrive while we were out there – they keep their own time, ideas like this, and mostly they show up sometime after you let go of your expectations, really let them go, with no promise that anything will come along to take their place. You have to give up. And then, if you’re lucky, something shows up, and it doesn’t look like what you were expecting, but maybe it is the thing you didn’t know you were looking for.

    So yeah, something showed up. In the days afterwards, nurtured in conversations around our kitchen table, an idea took shape. And here it is – it’s time to start a school.

    This year, Anna and I are starting a school together. It’s a school called HOME, a school for culturemakers. Over the past few months, we’ve been figuring out how to talk about it, starting to tackle the practicalities – and today it’s time to share where we’ve got to and make an invitation.

    Here’s one way that we talk about it:

    HOME is a school where we study the mess the world is in, not as a set of discrete problems to be solved, but as a tangled and humbling predicament.

    We follow the roots of this predicament deep into history, uncovering the buried assumptions which have shaped our ways of seeing and being in the world, catching sight of the possibilities those assumptions hid from view.

    We learn from artists, philosophers, community builders, improvisors, historians and poets. Looking for a term to bridge these worlds, we call ourselves a school for culturemakers. We cultivate the art of invitation, hospitality and friendship, finding here the seeds of other ways of being human together.

    It starts quite simply with a one-week course this summer. The course will run from 4-8 June in the village of Ängelsberg, a couple of hours train ride west of Stockholm. I’ll be teaching alongside my friend Andrew Taggart, a practical philosopher who weaves webs of conversation, enquiring into the gaps within our present ways of life. We’re calling the course Finding Our Way Home and it starts with a question: ‘What if the culture you grew up in was broken in ways that you didn’t even have words for?’

    We’ve already taken a few bookings before we got as far as launching a website, but today the site is launched and open for enquiries. You can read the rest of the invitation that we’ve made – and, given that the last residential course I taught sold out with two months to go, should you find that the invitation speaks to you, then I’d encourage you to send us an enquiry without delay.

    Meanwhile, in the spirit of these letters, I want to head a little deeper into the woods, to think aloud about what it means to start a school, where this has come from and where it might be heading – and, for those with long memories, to say a word or two about that time when I was going to start a university.

    There are books that matter to you immensely at a certain moment in your life and a few years later you can hardly remember why – and then there are pieces of writing, often no more than a few lines, that you know you’d carry with you to the ends of the world. One of mine is a passage from The Cultivation of Conspiracy, an address given by Ivan Illich in Bremen in 1998. He is looking back on the places of convivial learning that he had created with his friends over the previous forty years – from a ‘thinkery’ in a one-room shack on a Puerto Rican hillside, to the Centre for Intercultural Documentation at Cuernavaca, Mexico, to the hospitable household at Kreftingstraße, where on Fridays after Illich’s lectures the spaghetti bowl would feed two dozen guests around the table, with sometimes more spilling out to sit on the Mexican rugs in the next room. In all of these places, he says, they have sought to foster a particular atmosphere:

    Learned and leisurely hospitality is the only antidote to the stance of deadly cleverness that is acquired in the professional pursuit of objectively secured knowledge. I remain certain that the quest for truth cannot thrive outside the nourishment of mutual trust flowering into a commitment to friendship.

    I’ve carried those lines for years, like a navigational instrument, looking for the places which have that atmosphere, seeking to cultivate it in the spaces where I’ve worked. So when I think about what it means to start a school, it doesn’t start with a course or a curriculum or a building, but with the way of being together that Illich is talking about.

    There are people whose work you discover at the right moment. The year I discovered Illich, I was twenty-five and I’d just walked out on what looked like the beginnings of a successful career at the BBC. I’ve heard stories like this often enough now to know the pattern: sometimes you have to give up, to turn down the offer no sensible person would refuse, to walk away without any explanations that will satisfy your friends’ parents or your parents’ friends, because that’s the price of entry to a different kind of life. At the time, all I knew was that I’d exchanged a staff job in the newsroom for temping in warehouses and call centres, a new sense of freedom, and the realisation that the university careers service didn’t have any lives my shape. If I wasn’t going to contort myself into one of the careers on offer, I would have to make a life of my own. 

    Books were my friends that year and I read with a focus that surpassed anything I’d had as a student at Oxford. I was reading for my life and the writers I discovered became my companions.

    Four years down the road, I would travel to Cuernavaca, to a gathering of Illich’s friends and collaborators, where the atmosphere he spoke about in Bremen still lingered in the late night conversations. I remember sharing a taxi through the city with one of them, Carl Mitcham, and telling him that I was working on an internet startup inspired by Deschooling Society. At this, he burst out laughing. ‘I remember Ivan telling me, “People are saying I invented this internet!” The thought was enough to make him throw up his hands in horror!’

    School of Everything – the startup I co-founded in 2006 – took its inspiration from Illich and the ‘free universities’ of the late 1960s, but the path it went down was summed up by Cory Doctorow, who wrote that we were building ‘the eBay for learning’. What’s strange is that we knew better. The five of us who started it had met in a room where learning was understood as a matter of relations, not transactions. It was one of a series of such rooms, spaces with names like the University of Openness, the Temporary School of Thought and the Really Free School. On a good day, they too had that atmosphere, and they were spaces in which people seemed to come alive.

    Out of those experiences came a desire for something more-than-temporary. And I had been learning the art of talking projects into reality: after School of Everything, I started Spacemakers, and the same year, Paul and I launched Dark Mountain. I’d grasped something about how to tell a big story and invite people to step inside that story and make it real together. I was just past thirty, and making up for lost time, running off the raw red energy that comes with discovering your own abilities. I didn’t know much yet about limits, or about failure.

    So in the early spring of 2011, I threw out my biggest story yet. First on the internet, and then in talks at places like the Royal Society of Arts and TEDx London, I asked for help to start a new kind of university. I’d pulled off enough wild schemes by then that people gave me a hearing, and all kinds of conversations and connections came about as a result – but as summer turned to autumn, the plan unravelled, while the pace at which I’d been living finally caught up with me. Within a year, I would leave London.

    It was a humbling time. Soon after I arrived in Sweden, I remember my old friend Charlie Davies – he was the one who had brought together the temporary school where the founders of School of Everything first met – handing me a small coin, looking me in the eye, and saying, ‘I give you failure.’ There are journeys for which no other currency is taken.

    The luckiest stroke I ever had was that, just as my London life fell to pieces, I met someone who could see past the mess I was in and who chose to make a life with me. Anna and I had been travelling different routes, but steering by the same stars. In her case, the route had led from connecting cultural foundations around Europe, to setting up children’s libraries in the Middle East and supporting women’s organisations in Israel and Palestine. At the heart of it was a commitment to conviviality: her tiny flat in Stockholm was dominated by a table large enough to seat fourteen; the wall between the kitchen and the bedroom had been taken down to make room for it.

    As I said goodbye to London, having given up on the idea of starting some kind of university, I remember an unfamiliar sensation of patience. Whatever mattered about that idea would come back in a different form when the time was right.

    If the time seems right now, that’s firstly because I’m not doing it alone. Over the past six years, Anna and I have made a home together that is a place of friendship, hospitality and intercultural encounter. We knew from the start that we wanted to make a wider invitation and create a shared foundation for our work. In the idea of a school called HOME, that intention has found its form.

    Then it’s because I have things to teach. Looking back, those earlier free universities and temporary schools were a source of fellowship, a meeting point for an invisible college in which I found my contemporaries – and bringing people together like that still feels vital. But in the past couple of years, I’ve found that the teaching I do is moving to the heart of my work. Walking into a room, sharing stories and ways of thinking that I’ve found helpful, letting the questions that follow lead us deeper. (As I write this, I remember a recent visit to the Kaospilots school in Aarhus, Denmark: for a month afterwards, most days my phone would ping with mails and messages from students who had been in that room, still resonating with the ideas we’d talked about.) So I want to create the conditions where I can do that well.

    Finally, the time seems right because I’ve come to see another way of making projects happen. Sometimes telling the biggest story you can and getting hundreds or thousands of people to step inside it is the way to go – but the best work often happens more quietly. I’m prouder of the West Norwood Feast, the community-owned streetmarket that Spacemakers helped start in south London, than the project that we did at Brixton Village, which is the one that got all the attention.

    For several years now, I’ve been teaching residential courses at places like Schumacher College, so the first step in starting this school is to take that kind of course and organise it on our own terms.

    Beyond that, Anna and I are inspired by the example of small schools that offer longer programmes – places like the Westcountry School of Myth and Story, run by our friend Martin Shaw, or Stephen Jenkinson’s School of Orphan Wisdom. So before long, we want to create something along those lines, making an invitation to be part of a learning community that comes together several times a year.

    In the longer-term, our intention is to find a permanent location, a place we can call home in all senses of the word, with the further possibilities that would offer. A few years from now, I’d love to be holding a yearly summer school, a little like what I’ve heard tell of the summers in Cuernavaca, half a century ago. 

    In the meantime, we’ve found a beautiful setting in which to get started, working with a family-run hostel in Ängelsberg. It’s a village of 150 people with its own railway station, there’s a lakeside sauna and all the other things you’d want in Sweden with midsummer around the corner. And going by the first few people who are on board, it will be quite a special gang that gathers there this June.

    There was a time when I was launching projects left, right and centre – throwing out ideas, some of which took on a life of their own, while others left no trace. Writing this, I realise that it’s been a while since I launched something new, and rarely have I put as much of my heart into a project as with this little idea for a school.

    It won’t be a school of everything, and it doesn’t promise to reinvent the university. We’re not out to build a grand highway to the future. This is a little road heading into the woods. Maybe you will join us on that road. I hope so.

    Published as Issue 16 of Crossed Lines, my occasional email newsletter, to mark the launch of a school called HOME.

  • Seeing in the Dark: A Tribute to John Berger

    Seeing in the Dark: A Tribute to John Berger

    The news came last thing at night. Next morning, the loss lay quietly over everything, like a fall of snow. John Berger, who once wrote that all storytellers are Death’s secretaries, had died.

    Storyteller was what he liked to be called, a term that could stretch to take in the many roles he played. Among them, the role of thinker. He thought through stories. He was a thinker who wrote from the heart, who refused the separation between heart and head that runs deep in the dominant culture against which he fought with every sentence. One of his last books takes the form of a dialogue with the 17th century philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, to whose work he had been drawn as a young man on account of ‘his rejection of the Cartesian division between the physical and the spiritual, between body and soul.’

    With words he made spaces into which the reader could enter. All writers do this, but he was more aware of it than most, because he started as a painter. Handled with skill, paint opens out beyond the two dimensions of the canvas. In his hands, the linearity of the written word deepened into a space to be inhabited, a space in which you could find shelter. Like many others, I found shelter in his words.

    After his death, his friend Anthony Barnett wrote: ‘He ended a form of isolation in many he never met.’ Strictly speaking, this is true; at least, it was my experience. I was twenty-five. I’d just walked away from the beginnings of a career at the BBC. When The Shape of a Pocket landed in my hands one lunchtime in a bookshop in south London, it read like a letter from the wiser friend I badly needed. Yet we did meet — and not only that one time, years later, at the British Library, but many times, and I know I am not alone in this experience: his books were places where we met. They were shaped by the commitment to hospitality which was central to his way of being in the world. This is why the grief feels so personal: we have lost someone we knew and felt known by, someone whose generosity touched our lives.

    Writing this, I catch myself hesitating between ‘we’ and ‘I’. There are writers you meet at the right time in your life, books that you find at a crossroads.(‘This is a book about keeping rendezvous,’ Berger wrote. ‘The ones I failed to keep are another story.’) I know that I do not speak for myself alone, but also that my experience is not everyone’s. In particular, I wonder how differently those who know Berger only or mainly through his most famous work — the TV series and the book of Ways of Seeing, the Booker-winning G.— encounter him? Watching him on camera in that famous shirt, or in the scene where he has invited a group of women to discuss the female figure in art, for all that he may have grasped the insights of feminism, there is something of the playboy to him, an echo of the seducer at the centre of that novel. Soon afterwards, this was gone.

    Both the novel and the series were made in 1972. A year later, he came to settle in the village of Quincy in the Haute Savoie. His neighbours were among the last generation of peasants in western Europe. For the next forty years, he lived and worked alongside them, bearing witness to their way of living. He did so with an unmistakeable respect, as unable to romanticise the hardships of their lives as he was unwilling to accept the categories through which the world at large would see them. Much changed in his work from that point. The nature of this change was not a turning away — ‘Yes, I’m still amongst other things a Marxist,’ he could write in 2005, still true to the pledge made in the title of his first collection, Permanent Red — but a deepening, hinted at in those ‘other things’.

    He belonged to that generation of European intellectuals who were in their late thirties or early forties in 1968. Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard, Lyotard: all of them were born between 1924 and 1930. As much as any of them, Berger’s work was shaped by the events with which that year became synonymous:

    In 1968, hopes, nurtured more or less underground for years, were born in several places in the world and given their names: and in the same year, these hopes were categorically defeated. This became clearer in retrospect. At the time many of us tried to shield ourselves from the harshness of this truth. — Ernst Fischer: A Philosopher and Death (1974)

    The work of coming to terms with that historical disappointment was the context within which what we think of as postmodernism took shape. Struggling with the esoteric idiolects of its major theorists, the uninitiated reader may suspect that she is swimming through clouds of intellectual squid ink, thrown up as they made their retreat from the streets to the seminar room. If this is not entirely fair, still the contrast to the hospitable quality of Berger’s prose is striking. He wrote with a desire to be understood.

    He did his thinking through stories. It would never have occurred to him to construct an explicit architecture of theory, though he referred with appreciation to the work of others who did just that. Still, among the many ways of seeing Berger, I find it helpful to see him as a postmodernist, albeit of a different type. Running through his later work is a careful attempt to disentangle the ethical commitments of his Marxism from the logic of progress and the historical optimism of modernity, and to re-entangle it with a vernacular metaphysics, tested against the hard experience of life on the wrong side of the walls that divide the world. There is a universality to this writing, but it is arrived at through a grounding in place, the particular soil of Quincy, which he called ‘my university’. He did his thinking around the kitchen table or in the cowshed, rather than the seminar room, and this is why his work seems to belong within the category which Gustavo Esteva and Madhu Suri Prakash proposed in the title of their 1998 book, Grassroots Postmodernism: the search for routes out of the dead end of modernity, not as a theoretical exercise, but a matter of life and death, among the billions of people whose ways of living are subject to ongoing processes of so-called modernisation.

    When I arrived in Mexico in 2011, I found that his book on migrant workers in Europe — written in the mid-1970s — had just been translated and published there in Spanish; its account of the migrant experience spoke directly to those away in the North and to the families they had left behind. The morning after we heard the news of his death, my partner’s Facebook feed was full of tributes from friends in Palestine. Few European thinkers of our time have mattered more to people on the wrong side of history’s walls.

    His death comes at a time when the world seems to be darkening. There is much in his work that can help us learn to see in the dark. I think of the speech he gave to fellow members of the Transnational Institute in the early 1980s:

    Suppose… that we are not living in a world in which it is possible to construct something approaching heaven-on-earth, but, on the contrary are living in a world whose nature is far closer to that of hell. What difference would this make to any single one of our political or moral choices? All that would have changed would be the enormity of our hopes and finally the bitterness of our disappointments. — Leopardi (1983)

    At a time when many on the left seem to insist that there can be no sense of belonging or commitment to place which does not darken into blood-and-soil fascism, his example shows that this is false — though his insistence on hospitality challenges those who are trying to articulate the importance of place and belonging to do so without sliding into the mentality of the wall-builders. Meanwhile, the kindness which everyone who knew him remembers, and which shines through his writing, challenges us to find less destructive modes of expression than the culture of performative indignation that pervades the space of political conversation in the age of Twitter. And when despair closes in, when the struggle to make sense of the world seems lost, I will find myself going back to his words, to passages like the one that closes his essay on Leopardi:

    The production of reality has never been finished, its outcome has never been made decisive. Something is always in the balance. Reality is always in need. Even of us, damned and marginal as we may be.

    That afternoon, it began to snow. I sat down to write to a friend who had been working closely with him over the last few years. I wrote of the sense of a great debt, one that could never be repaid — and then the realisation that what we received from him had never been meant as a loan, but as a gift. What a lifetime of generosity. How lucky we were.

    Published in Contemporary Theatre Review: Volume 27, Issue 3.

  • Where the Words Run Out

    There is no such thing as standing, there is only being held up.

    – Franz Rosenzweig

    A small audience sits scattered across a large auditorium at Chalmers University. The first thing we do is to invite them to move to the front, so that we can be closer to each other.

    ‘Thank you,’ I tell them. ‘You didn’t have to do that – and you did it.’

    Where the Words Run Out is an experiment, a performance for two dancers and a writer running out of words, an improvisation that leads into a conversation.

    It came about thanks to a chain of serendipitous encounters which became friendships. First, with the historian of ideas, Per Johansson (responsible for this Swedish-language podcast), who I met five years earlier in another auditorium in Gothenburg, the first time I went to speak at FSCONS, the annual Nordic hacker convention. He tells the story of our meeting here.

    It was Per who introduced the dancer and choreographer Emelie Enlund to the Dark Mountain manifesto – and she took that text and ran with it, developing a whole practice of ‘uncivilised dance’. The most recent manifestation of that was the show We Love Holocene IV at Dansens Hus, Stockholm, back in April.

    Sara Rousta and Alexander Dam were two of the dancers in that show. Back home in Gothenburg, where she is completing her final year of high school, Sara had got involved in organising the AHA! festival of science and art.

    ‘I’ve got a couple of ideas,’ Sara said on the phone. ‘We could get you here to do a keynote – or maybe you could collaborate with me and Alex on some kind of performance?’

    That’s how we got here, on the stage. I’m talking about what I’ve learned, working with writers and artists, about the role that culture might yet play under the shadow of climate change. I’m used to talking without notes, I can always pull in a line or a story that will keep things going, but this afternoon is different – when I feel the thread slipping, that I’m starting to use the words to hold a distance between myself and what I’m talking about, then I let myself come to a halt. Hold the silence, long enough that it moves beyond any discomfort. At some point, I can feel movement starting up behind me, as Alex and Sara pick up the thread.

    The theme of this year’s festival is ‘autonomy’ and that sent me back to those words of Franz Rosenzweig, from a letter to Ilse Hahn:

    You know, you needn’t feel bad because you lack the power to ‘tell yourself the whole truth’, for once, for your own good. Believe me, no man has this power; no man can help himself.

    As a writer, there is a temptation to take on the role of the lone truth-teller. The actual work of writing takes place, after all, in solitude. And one thing I’ve come to see through working with hundreds of writers, artists and performers is that the artistic duty – in so much as such a word makes sense at all – is a duty to whatever is missing from the ‘social truth’, whatever is obscured by the ways of seeing the world which are currently dominant (or simply taken for granted) in the neighbourhood in which you find yourself working. This is what makes art such an unreliable tool for all the socially-useful tasks it gets called upon to perform. There is something marginal – and potentially isolating – about such an artistic calling. Yet I find myself uneasy with the way that this is stretched by the romantic idea of the artist or the writer which still haunts us. It puts too more weight on the individual than any of us can bear.

    This is where Rosenzweig’s words come back to me, gently mocking our tendency to claim the mantle of the lone truth-teller. The world is full of people who ‘try to make themselves believe’ that they can tell themselves the whole truth, he goes on, but ‘they succeed no better than Münchausen did when he tried to pull himself out of the mire by the scruff of his neck.’

    In the moment when I sit at my desk, writing these words, I may be the only bodily presence in the room; yet I find it a relief to be reminded that ‘you never think alone’. As Sara Wolcott put it the other day, describing a conversation in her kitchen in New York:

    While only two of us physically sat at the table as the sky turned from dark purple to a luminescent, turquoise blue, we were and we are […] surrounded by a cloud of witnesses, spirits and living memories. Let none of us make the mistake to think that when we think, we only think alone. For we are informed in so many ways by so many people. We are shaped today by communities of disparate time and space.

    What I love about working with people like Alex and (the other) Sara, who work with such different skills and practices, is the possibility of seeing in each other’s blindspots. Dancers are, in my experience, less prone to the lone truth-teller fantasy than writers. And Rosenzweig’s images are splendidly physical and embodied, making a good starting point for a collaboration such as ours.

    The hour that the three of spend on stage together seems to pass before we have noticed. By the end, we are sitting with the audience, moving in and out of silence, as they bring their own words to what has become a conversation.

    AHA! festival gave us the chance to try out this work – and based on the warmth of the response it received and how much we enjoyed working together, we’ll be looking for the opportunity to develop it further in 2018.