DOUGALD HINE

Tag: essays

  • Introduction to the Fifth Anniversary Edition of the Dark Mountain Manifesto

    Introduction to the Fifth Anniversary Edition of the Dark Mountain Manifesto

    It is unusual for a twenty-page, self-published pamphlet to be given a two-page lead review in the New Statesman, and rarer still for that pamphlet to start a cultural movement that the New York Times can introduce to its readers as ‘changing the environmental debate in Britain and the rest of Europe.’ Yet those are two of the more public markers of the strange journey taken by this manifesto in the five years from its first publication to the preparation of this new edition.

    We get emails most days from readers who have found something here that resonates with their own experience. They write about hope, recognition, a sense of feeling less alone. Sometimes an email leads to a collaboration, some- times a collaboration deepens into a friendship that would not have existed were it not for this text. The fruits of those collaborations make their way into the Dark Mountain books – six books so far, and counting – where hundreds of writers, thinkers and artists from around the world have ventured further down the paths we started to sketch out here.

    Then there are the attacks. We have been called all sorts of things: Romantic dreamers, crazy collapsitarians, defeatists, utopians and nihilists. A professor of social policy used a paper in an academic journal to present Dark Mountain as an example of clinical ‘catastrophism’: ‘a temporary or sometimes recurring difficulty in getting things in perspective or proportion.’ The journalist Bryan Appleyard made the rather startling allegation that we represent ‘a form of psychosis’ likely to ‘create more corpses than ever dreamed of by even the Unabomber.’ There have been thoughtful critical responses, too, sometimes leading to conversations in which we come to understand each other better, but these are less frequent than the angry accusers and the long-distance psychoanalysts. 

    Putting all these different reactions alongside each other, trying to make out the pattern that they form, what strikes me is how little it resembles a taking of sides over a recognisable argument. Something else is going on, something that reaches into murkier corners of ourselves than are generally given space on the shores of public debate. The lines of thinking that run through this manifesto are also the contours of a dark shape, an inkblot shape of our puzzlements, doubts and fears—so that, even more than is always the case with the slippery substance of language, every reading is also a veiled reflection of the reader. There are monsters here, if you look for them; there are dead ends, but there are also slender threads of possibility waiting for someone to pick them up. 

    The text which became Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto took shape over a period of six months, starting in the summer of 2008. From this distance, it already seems like the last summer of another age. Not an innocent age – no one could call it that – but an age in which certain delusions were easier to sustain. Then, wham! Lehman Brothers came down and for a few weeks we saw the naked fear of powerful men with no idea how much of their world will be left standing. If you got any kind of a kick out of that final scene in the film Fight Club, when the music swells and the credit card companies’ skyscrapers detonate, then you had to feel some exhilaration, even as your wiser self whispered that all this was not about to end in a jubilee of cancelled first world debt. 

    As the mayhem of those weeks subsided, as the months that followed became years, we found ourselves in an age where crisis has become the new normal. An age of widening extremes and darkening horizons, when outbreaks of hope spark sporadically like broken power lines across networks and onto the streets, but the future no longer holds the promise it used to. Young people struggle to achieve the everyday security on which to build a life, something their parents took for granted. And all the while, beyond the bubble of the disorientated west, the epic of loss grows louder: more species, more languages, more landscapes every year. 

    None of this started with the financial ruptures of late 2008. But most of it intensified in the aftermath of those events, becoming at the same time harder to ignore. And if this manifesto has travelled further than we imagined, one explanation is that it has helped people to get their bearings in a world where the thin, shiny surface of prosperity has cracked. Trying to make sense of our own experience, it seems that we put words to a feeling that others shared and that has become more widespread in the years since. A feeling that there is no way through the mess in which we find ourselves that doesn’t involve facing the darkness, being honest about the scale of the unravelling that is under way, the uncertainty as to where it will end. A feeling that it is time to look down. 

    After it was published, people assumed that we must have been friends for years, but in reality Paul and I were still getting to know one another. We had met on the internet, reading each other’s blogs and recognising common ground. Both writers, both recovering journalists, both of us had been through intense periods of involvement with activism and arrived at a certain kind of disillusionment. 

    We were disturbed by the state of environmentalism. It seemed that sustainability had come to mean sustaining the western way of living at all costs, regardless of whether this was possible or desirable. As carbon emissions continued to mount, prominent campaigners spoke privately of their pessimism, but still got up at rallies to give the same rousing speeches. The movement was in danger of becoming a church where the priests have lost their faith, but don’t believe the congregation are ready for the truth. And when you tried to talk about this, it was always framed as a choice between insisting on the efficacy of more marches, petitions, boycotts and treaties, in spite of decades of failure – or giving up, which meant despair. 

    We were disturbed by the state of literature and the cultural landscape. I remember feeling that most of the books being celebrated in the Sunday newspapers were going to look irrelevant or offensive in a generation’s time, given what we already knew about where things were headed. A passage from Ian McEwan’s 2005 novel Saturday embodied this, when Henry Perowne starts musing about what will happen if ‘the present dispensation’ is wiped out: 

    the future will look back on us as gods … lucky gods blessed by supermarket cornucopias, torrents of accessible information, warm clothes that weigh nothing, extended life-spans, wondrous machines.

    The possibility that the future might view us in a different light did not seem to cross his or McEwan’s mind. Even on those occasions when writers did their best to face the entangled ecological, economic and social crises that surround us, the results tended to be unsatisfying: art deadening into a communication tool for messages from scientists and campaigners, soap-opera scale stories playing out against a backdrop of melting icebergs and failing negotiations. The literary tools inherited from the recent past seemed ill-adapted to the times into which we were heading. 

    These were the conversations we had, first over email and then in the corners of pubs, making lists in our notebooks, sharing names, mapping constellations of writers whose words we had found we could steer by. The idea of a literary journal came naturally, not because we thought it was the answer to all of this, but because it might provide a space to ask the questions. Besides, from the age of eight, I had always been starting little magazines and newspapers, and I can’t imagine Paul was any different. He had more experience of the grown-up world of publishing, not least from his time running The Ecologist, while I had been discovering the way that words can spread over networks, as one of the editors of Pick Me Up, a weekly email newsletter of DIY culture. That gave us the idea of crowdfunding for Dark Mountain, at a time when inboxes were not yet deluged with invitations to Kickstarter campaigns. 

    If we were going to start a journal, it seemed a good idea to kick this off with an essay that explained why we were doing it, that framed an invitation or a challenge. That was what we agreed at the end of an evening in early summer in a pub beside the Thames just outside Oxford. It was in the barn behind the same pub, just over a year later – on the 17th of July, 2009 – that we launched the resulting manifesto to an audience of a few dozen friends and family who between them had put up the money to fund its printing. Someone suggested afterwards that it was strange to ask people to support a manifesto before they had read it, and I suppose that is true, but I don’t think any of our funders had seen the text before that night. 

    The first edition of the manifesto was a hand-stitched pamphlet, made by our friends at Bracketpress of Rochdale, Lancashire. It went through three more printings before the number of copies needed exceeded the sensible limits of their fingers and we decided to republish it as the slim book you now hold in your hands.  

    Why go to all the bother of printing, when we could just have released it onto the internet? We got asked this occasionally, sometimes with an edge of moralising at the waste of resources, as if the servers that hold up the web run on fairy dust.  

    From the outset, the text has also been available online, and a hundred times as many people must have read it on our website as in print. But there is something about the unnecessary effort of making a physical object in a digital age that changes its meaning. So long as letters were the primary form of correspondence, their existence was functional, taken for granted. Now, think what it means today on the rare occasions when a handwritten letter arrives from a friend, and think about how different this feels to the arrival of another email in your inbox. 

    For those who believe – not unreasonably – perhaps that a manifesto should offer a set of proposals, a plan of action, a prescription for the new school of writing it intends to inaugurate, this may not be the most satisfying of manifestos. ‘What are you saying we should do?’ was a frequent reaction, put to us with varying levels of frustration, not least by activist friends. 

    Slowly, over time, we worked towards our own answers to this question. If you follow Paul’s essays through the course of the first five Dark Mountain books, they trace a journey towards one such answer. Other contributors offer their own examples, and the examples differ, because these are not loud, confident, once-and-for-all answers. They are provisional, maybe good enough for here and for now, for putting one foot in front of the other. They do not relieve you of the responsibility of finding your own answers, though they may provide clues as to what the process looks like. 

    But all that came after the manifesto, which was written when we were still working out how to frame the questions. To write a manifesto is to write loudly – ‘A manifesto,’ bellows Tristan Tzara, ‘is a communication made to the whole world, whose only pretension is to the discovery of an instant cure for political, astronomical, artistic, parliamentary, agronomical and literary syphilis!’ – but under all the sound and the fury, at the heart of this manifesto is a hunch that sometimes it is right to walk away, to withdraw, to give up on hopes that no longer ring true, even though you have no answer to the accusing questions that will follow. Sometimes retreat is the only action left that makes sense. To give up things you have held dear – beliefs, identities, habits – is an end, but it can also be a beginning, though it makes you no promises in advance. Only the chance that, having let go, as your eyes begin to adjust to the darkness, you may catch sight of something that your bright certainties had hidden from you. 

    If you were to ask either of us, five years on, do we stand by what we wrote in this manifesto, I suspect our answers would be similar. We stand by it, not as a stockade to be defended, but as a first attempt to say something, to work out how to say something, the fuller significance of which we are still discovering in the company of a growing gang of friends and collaborators, most of whom would never have met if we hadn’t been brave enough, or foolish enough, to commit these words to print in the first place. 

    Published in the 2014 and subsequent editions of Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto.

  • A Five Hundred Year Moment?

    Florence, 1330. Between the weak forces of the Pope and the Emperor, in the patchwork of city states that stretches north to the Alps and spans the Italian peninsula, the first outlines of the Renaissance are starting to break the pattern of the Middle Ages. Nowhere more so than in this city, birthplace of Dante and Petrarch — this city whose banking houses now fund half the rulers of Europe. Home to more than 120,000 people, it is second in size only to Paris. The roots of its prosperity lie in the local woollen trade, which spiralled upwards in sophistication to become a proto-industrial system, drawing in the best raw material from England and Iberia, cleaning, carding, spinning, dying and weaving it into fine cloth to be sold across Europe and even in the marketplaces of the East.

    Much of this rise in prosperity took place within a single lifetime, the lifetime of a rich cloth merchant who died in the September of 1330 and left his property to be distributed amongst the destitute of Florence. His will was carried out by the Confraternity of Orsanmichele. On the appointed date, those who qualified as destitute were locked inside the city’s churches at midnight. There were 17,000 of them. As they were released, each received his or her share of the inheritance. From the records of the Confraternity, we know who qualified. The destitute fell into five categories: the orphans, the widows, anyone who had been the victim of a recent act of God (in other words, a serious injury or illness), the heads of family totally dependent on wage work, and those compelled to pay rent in order to have somewhere to sleep.

    It is these last two categories that should cause us to think twice. To be dependent on working for wages, or to have to keep up regular payments in order to have somewhere to call home — at the close of the Middle Ages, either of these things was a sign of destitution, misery and impotence. Somewhere in the intervening centuries, both have become so utterly taken for granted that the pity they once attracted is not easy to grasp. Today, we are more likely to number among the destitute those unable to find wage work. Yet if we could borrow a time machine, go back to the late 1320’s and scoop up our Florentine cloth merchant, bringing him back to the streets of Västerås or Malmö in 2014, how would our way of living look to him? No doubt he would be astounded by the tools and toys that we take for granted, by the number of us who live to old age, and by a hundred other transformations — but after a week or so, as he began to believe his eyes, would we be able to convince him to look differently on the phenomena of wage-labour and the monthly rental or mortgage payment? I am not sure.

    Our ancestors took a slower route from the proto-industrial stirrings of the late Middle Ages to the post-industrial Europe in which we find ourselves, but they did not go gently into the condition of dependence on wage-labour which is the foundation of employment as we now know it. The extent of their resistance is obscured, partly because — as we will see, shortly — it does not fit into any of the historical narratives that came to frame politics in the 19th and 20th centuries, and partly because it does not resemble the forms of action that came to define political resistance in that period.

    For a long time, the primary form of resistance to wage-labour was simply a persistent unwillingness to give up the varied activities and irregular rhythms of the day, the week and the year. In England, where full-on industrialisation came earliest, the historian E.P. Thompson catalogues the complaints of the authorities and (would-be) employers against the ordinary people:

    If you offer them work, they will tell you that they must go to look up their sheep, cut furzes, get their cow out of the pound, or, perhaps, say they must take their horse to be shod, that he may carry them to a horse-race or a cricket match. — Arbuthnot, 1773

    When a labourer becomes possessed of more land than he and his family can cultivate in the evenings … the farmer can no longer depend on him for constant work… — Commercial & Agricultural Magazine, 1800

    These difficulties were resolved by the process of enclosure, a series of laws by which the ‘commons’ — land held in traditional forms of collective ownership, to which local people had a web of overlapping rights of access, grazing and foraging — were privatised. Carried out in the name of ‘agricultural improvement’, enclosure was essential to the creation of a large class with no alternative to renting out their bodies at a daily or a weekly rate.

    While rural life in England had been shaped by the customary rights of the commons, the skilled trades were also governed by longstanding customary agreements. These formed the basis of a way of living in which artisans worked largely on their own terms, combining the practice of their trade with other activities and shaping the rhythms of their work as they wished. By the early 19th century, this arrangement was under attack from new legislation and new industrial practices. When their petitions to parliament went unheard, the weavers of Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire and Lancashire were ready to fight rather than be reduced to the status of wage labourers in other men’s factories. This was the origin of the Luddite movement: attacking mills by night, smashing the machinery and sometimes burning the owners’ houses, it ran through the manufacturing districts of the three counties between 1811 and 1813.

    The tendency of grown men to smash up the machines contributed to the preference of manufacturers for employing women and young children. To create a modern workforce, fully accustomed to the submission of their time and energy to their employer’s command, it was necessary to start young — and so the story of how wage-labour went from a stigma to a human right forms the shadow side of the history of education. The process is described quite openly by William Temple, writing in 1770, as he makes the case for sending the children of the poor to workhouses from the age of four:

    There is considerable use in their being, somehow or other, constantly employed at least twelve hours a day, whether they earn their living or not; for by these means, we hope that the rising generation will be so habituated to constant employment that it would at length prove agreeable and entertaining to them.

    The origins of mass education are double-edged: on the one hand, the extension of schooling was often pushed forward by those sincerely dedicated to rescuing children from the horrors of the industrial workplace in its earlier forms; on the other, it served as the means to produce an obedient industrial workforce, accustomed to the discipline of completing tasks, often meaningless to them, under the direction of an authority figure and with strict rules concerning time-keeping.

    It took generations to complete this transformation. Meanwhile, at the height of the Luddite movement, it took 12,000 troops to restore order to the three counties, a larger force than Wellington had under his command that year in the ongoing war against Napoleon. Even then, it took months before the British government felt it had the situation under control. This was only one episode in the long history of resistance to the new model of economic life represented by the factories and the wage-labour system. The way of life which the Luddites and others struggled to defend against these innovations was undoubtedly a tough one, but the intensity of their struggle is perhaps the clearest evidence of its worth to those who knew it best.

    The experience of wage-labour today differs greatly from the conditions of the early industrial factories, at least in countries like ours. The eight-hour day, sick pay, paid holidays, parental leave and the other rights that frame our expectations of working life represent the achievements of the labour movement that grew up in the generations following the defeat of the Luddites. The struggle to defend other ways of living against the dominance of wage-labour had been lost, at least in the most industrialised countries. The new movement struggled instead to achieve a better deal within the system built by the winners. If we are tempted to take its achievements for granted, we just have to think of the gap between our lives and the lives of those who make our iPhones or those who mine the coltan that goes into their making.

    Essential to the labour movement has been the normalisation of the identity of the worker. In pointing to this, I am not trying to question its achievements, only to approach a clearer understanding of where we find ourselves today. If we struggle to grasp the pity which the condition of dependence on wage-labour elicited in 14th century Florence — if we misread the fierceness with which people fought against being forced into that condition in England at the start of the 19th century, taking it for ignorant fear of technological progress — then this is probably because, for most of the intervening period, the opposed political and economic forces structuring our societies have been united in the assumption that this kind of work is normal and desirable. Wherever you look, to the left or to the right, you will have a hard time finding a politician who doesn’t want to create more jobs. They may argue over the best means to do so, but they would hardly think of asking whether employment as we know it is a good thing.

    My purpose in excavating these older and contrasting attitudes to work is to make it possible to ask that question. It is necessary to add, almost immediately, that this is not inspired by any idea of the past as a Golden Age. Not only is there much that we would not willingly give up about the age in which we find ourselves — even if we wanted to do so, it is not an option. The only time machine we have travels in one direction at a steady speed of just over 365 days per year and we have yet to find the gear stick. A politics that looks to the past with longing is no politics at all. Yet there may be other ways of looking to the past. In renouncing such romanticism, we have not necessarily exhausted the political potential of the backward gaze.

    Florence, 1345. The banking system is in meltdown. The houses of Peruzzi and Bardi have fallen, taking with them the political fortunes of the city’s aristocratic elite. The trigger is the decision of the English King Edward III to default on the debts he has built up in his war with France. In the aftermath of the collapse, records Giovanni Villani, the only people still in business are the moneylenders and the guildsmen. Larger forces will soon contribute to the tilting away from feudalism, not least the plague that is already making its westwards along the trade routes that span the old world. But it is those observed by Villani, the new men, the outsiders, who will begin to build a new kind of system in the ruins of the feudal order.

    The story is told by Paul Mason, until recently the economics editor of the BBC’s Newsnight, in a 2012 lecture at the London School of Economics. He uses it to frame a question — the best question, he suggests, that we could ask about the point in history at which we find ourselves: ‘Is this a 50-year or a 500-year moment?’ Is the structural crisis which broke out across the global economic system in 2008 more akin to the Depression of the 1930s, or to the crisis which marked the end of feudalism?

    The roots of the current crisis go back decades and, six years after that chaotic autumn of banking collapses and emergency bail-outs, it is still far from over. Interest rates remain at emergency levels, much of Europe struggles to achieve anything resembling economic growth, while bankers pioneer new forms of speculative asset which repackage subprime rental incomes into safe investments on the same principle applied so successfully to subprime mortgages. At a day-to-day level, structural economic crisis makes itself felt in the experience of employment, or its lack. A society with high levels of youth unemployment feels different, and not only for those directly affected, but for every young person whose experience of education becomes an anxious competition to avoid that fate, every parent who worries about their child’s future. Meanwhile, the deal of employment gets worse, as short-term contracts and precarity become normal in many sectors. In parts of the west, real incomes have been falling since long before the fall of Lehman Brothers: in Italy, the peak of prosperity was passed in 1997; in the US, a 30-year-old man could expect to earn 22% less in real terms in 2007 than he would have done in 1973.

    Those at the centre of existing institutions rarely put together the pieces clearly. Easier to announce new initiatives, or to focus on those elements within the economic data that point in a positive direction, even if this leads to a widening gap between the official account of reality and the experience of many voters. This gap manifests in growing support for populist parties, but also in a broader sense that things are getting worse. This April, an Ipsos poll found that only 19% of Swedes believe today’s young people will have a better life than their parents, compared to 43% who believe they will have a worse life. Responses to such questions are similar across the western countries. The future no longer holds the promise it once did.

    At this point, there may be one more historical parallel to be drawn. Feudalism was, in 1345, the most successful economic system the world had ever seen. This did not mean those at the top of that system were in a position to prevent its decline, nor did it mean that an alternative system was waiting to replace it. Instead, what followed was the uneven mixture of improvisation, idealism and opportunism out of which history is mostly made. In time, the outlines of the Renaissance that we can trace in the Italian city states of that century would become the foundations for the modern world. Yet its architects were not guided by the forward gaze that would come to characterise modernity. Their primary inspiration lay in the classical past of Greece and Rome, and it was here that they sought models for new institutions.

    If we do find ourselves in a 500-year moment, it may be that the past has more to offer us than nostalgia or romanticism, as the source for a sense of possibility that we no longer find in confident visions of the future. Because the future can only ever be a blank screen and the projections we throw up on that screen are inevitably shaped by the assumptions of the present. Whereas the past is there, like a dim mirror, and as our eyes adjust to its darkness and the strangeness of the things which the people there seem to take for granted, it can begin to reveal to us the strangeness of our own assumptions. If things are going to turn out better than often seems to be the case, in the years ahead, then I suspect it will be because we stumble upon possibilities that had been hidden from sight by the assumptions we inherited from the recent past — even assumptions such as the centrality, necessity and desirability of wage labour.

    Bibliographical Note

    The story of the Florentine cloth merchant is told in Ivan Illich, ‘Shadow Work’ in Beyond Economics & Ecology: The Radical Thought of Ivan Illich, ed. Sajay Samuel (2013). The quotes from Arbuthnot, Temple and the Commercial & Agricultural Magazine are taken from E.P. Thompson’s ‘Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism’, Past and Present, №38 (December 1967). On the Luddites, see E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963) and Warren Draper, ‘The Shuttle Exchanged for the Sword’, Dark Mountain, Issue 2 (2011). A video of Paul Mason’s lecture, ‘Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions’ (2012), is available on the LSE website.

    For practical proposals that relate to the ideas in this article, see Dougald Hine, ‘The Regeneration of Meaning’ in Global Utmaning, The Baltic Edge: Reflections on Youth, Work and Innovation in the Baltic Sea Region (2013).

    First published in MOORIA magazine.

  • An Outlandish Generosity

    An Outlandish Generosity

    A review of Martin Shaw’s A Branch from the Lightning Tree and Snowy Tower.

    The condition of Capitalist Realism, according to the political theorist Mark Fisher, is defined by ‘the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative.’ When I try to explain in daylight terms, rather than in the flicker of the campfire, why I think that Martin Shaw’s writings on myth, wilderness and wildness matter, I find myself remembering Fisher’s diagnosis. Then another passage comes to mind, from Mike Hulme, the founding director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Research:

    Climate change is not ‘a problem’ waiting for ‘a solution’. It is an environmental, cultural and political phenomenon which is re-shaping the way we think about ourselves, our societies and humanity’s place on Earth.

    They differ in the focus of their arguments, but both Fisher and Hulme point towards a crisis in which imagination — or its failure — plays a central role. The grip of neoliberalism is tightened by its success in closing down our imagination, while the ongoing collision with planetary boundaries forces us into a confrontation with the stories we tell ourselves about the world and our place within it. To take these suggestions seriously would mean giving the work of culture an importance that goes well beyond the familiar deployment of the arts as a transmission mechanism for messages about change.

    The past decade has seen no shortage of high-profile attempts to ‘tackle’ climate change as a theme in the arts. The results are generally disappointing. We get Ian McEwan writing an Ian McEwan novel about a philandering climate scientist. We get the National Theatre’s Greenland, in which storylines with all the depth of a soap opera play out against a background of melting icebergs and failing negotiations. Part of the trouble, I think, lies in the forms and conventions we have inherited from the recent past. Writers are schooled to grind sharp lenses of observation, to offer a microscopic attention to social detail, stereoscopic panoramas or endoscopic explorations of the individual psyche. There are some subjects, though, which can only be looked at indirectly, through the dark mirror of the shield with which Perseus approaches Medusa. As the shadows were driven into corners, by Enlightenment and then by electrification, we felt we had outgrown such ways of telling: stories that once belonged to everyone were sanitised, moralised and packed off to the nursery. Now, to our surprise, we find there is no position of detached observation left. As shadows lengthen over our whole way of living, we may once more be in need of the kind of storytelling that stalks truths so monstrous they turn our minds to stone if looked at straight on.

    This is the territory in which Martin Shaw works. Like the trickster characters who inhabit his stories, Shaw is a trafficker between worlds: as likely to be found retelling medieval epics around a Devon campfire or guiding rites-of-passage retreats for inner-city teenagers on a Welsh mountainside as lecturing on the course in Oral Tradition that he devised at Stanford. Readers of these, the first two volumes of what promises to be a trilogy on myth, wilderness and wildness, will meet him in all these guises. At times a little out of place in the formality of the written word, some of his sentences seem to have been dragged through a hedge backwards, but they build into a feast of language and image, infused with an outlandish generosity. Here is rich food for the imagination: old stories from Ireland and Norway and Siberia, stories of witches and knights, bear kings and wild women of the woods, capped with a full-scale telling of the Grail epic of Parzival.

    Running through both books is Shaw’s conviction that all of this is more than entertainment, romance or a relief from life’s hardships: that there exists, within stories like these, a kind of ‘mythological thinking’ that has its own rigour and that is of practical relevance to the largest and most urgent questions we encounter. Start out in this direction and, before long, you will pass the bounds of what it is respectable to take seriously as grown-ups in the kind of culture in which most of us grew up. Shaw is not remotely troubled by this: ‘If you don’t want to be Crazy Horse, Boudicca, or Pablo Neruda,’ he announces at the start, ‘stop reading now.’ Those afraid of looking foolish need not apply. Yet he insists on both the difficulty and the importance of bringing whatever wild insights we find out there back to the everyday world, the world which appears in these stories as that of the village or the court. ‘Don’t make a marginal life out of a marginal experience,’ he says, more than once, warning against the ‘smugness’ of an alternative culture in which we surround ourselves with like-minded souls.

    Within the traditions on which he draws, Shaw distinguishes two modes of story, the pastoral and the prophetic:

    The pastoral offers a salve, an affirmation of old, shared values, a reiteration of the power of the herd. The prophetic almost always brings some conflict with it — it disarms, awakens, challenges, and deepens. It is far less to do with enchantment and much more to do with waking up.

    It is this second kind of story we need right now, Shaw suggests: the kind that takes us out of who we think we are, that allows for the emergence of something new. Yet one of the characteristics of mythological thinking is that such pairings are not reduced to oppositions: instead, if we look carefully, we catch sight of the mutual dependence between seeming opposites.

    The old stories most often end with a homecoming, a feast, a celebration of the union of opposites. By contrast, if we go any distance along the wild paths to which Shaw invites us, our own return to the everyday is likely to be lonelier. We come back to a reality in which a myth is something to be debunked. Our experience of the possibility of other ways of knowing is met with incomprehension or disinterest. One of the strengths of these books is that they contain a great deal of experience of how to live between worlds — which is to say, between very different ways of understanding the world — without withdrawing, going crazy or burning out. That alone is worth the price of admission.

    There remains, though, the larger question: what does it mean to appeal to the imagination, to the realm of fairytales, in a world of failing negotiations and melting icebergs?

    One answer is that it provides a clue to the real nature of this crisis. The environmental movement has long tended to frame things in terms of the vulnerability of the planet. This is, in an important sense, a misunderstanding of what is at stake. Yes, we are living in a time of extraordinary ecological destruction, a mass extinction, perhaps the sixth in our planet’s history. But there’s the thing: the planet has been here before. Even the rapid shift in climate we have set in motion may not be unprecedented from a geological perspective. A million years from now, the planet will almost certainly be here, alive, in some as yet unimaginable ecological configuration. This is not to excuse the epic of destruction we have unleashed, but to try to understand it better.

    What is at stake is not the planet, as such, but a way of living within it that we have created as a species, parts of which go back tens of thousands of years, while other parts are barely a generation deep, though we already struggle to imagine living without them. Our sense of loss at all the shadowed beauty being driven out of existence, our guilt, our still-remaining desire to feel proud of our place as a species — all of this exists in tension with our attachment to what we know and our sense of powerlessness within the structures we have built. These forces play out within us and on a planetary scale.

    To understand the relationships between the inner and outer worlds that define the crisis, something like the subtlety of mythological thinking is required, its ability to dance with paradox and its openness to surprise. And perhaps, even now, there remains within the stories the capacity to make those relationships anew. For as Shaw says, that has always been the power of story: to ground us in such a way that a universe becomes a cosmos.

    First published in STIR: Issue 07.

  • A Farewell to Uncivilisation

    A Farewell to Uncivilisation

    The skies opened and all the waters in them fell at once. It was a rain so hard I remember the weight of it on my shoulders, so loud you had to shout to have a chance of being heard. Yet, uncommonly for England in summer, it was not a miserable rain. There was something triumphant about it.

    Perhaps because we all knew we would soon be in vehicles, heading back to the sheltered lives we had come from. Perhaps because we had already endured a weekend of hard showers, woodland mists and other watery intrusions. But also because it felt somehow like a seal of approval, a full-throated elemental roar in answer to the voices raised here in the past three days, the past four years, at the last moment of the fourth and last Uncivilisation festival.

    Insist too hard on the significance of a poetic coincidence and you will make people uncomfortable. Better to recount such moments as jokes the world seemed to join in with than as some kind of revelation, but my experience of those four festivals includes several of them. The first came that first year, before we had found the site in the Meon valley that became our home, when several hundred people gathered in Llangollen, unsure what to expect. The landscape was darker, wild and splendid, but the venue itself was a converted sports hall. We had never organised anything like this, and our hosts were used to organising comedy nights and concerts for local audiences who bought their tickets, sat in their seats, enjoyed the show, applauded and went home. We were unprepared for the logistics of a festival and unprepared for the ways in which a festival comes alive. There were a hundred things wrong: plastic beer in plastic cups, a campsite too long a walk from the venue, a main hall where rows of seats faced a stage where speakers could barely see for the dazzle of the theatre lighting. Yet somehow, in spite of it all, this became a place where magic could happen.

    The moment it happened for me, that year, was on the Sunday, as Jay Griffiths spoke about the shapeshifting power of language only for gremlins to take hold of the sound system so completely that the technicians could barely coax a murmur from it. After a couple of minutes of confusion, the room reassembled, people sitting in circles around Jay on the stage and on the floor. And there, the spell was broken, the face-off between speakers and spoken-to giving way to a shape as old as stories.

    From there on in, the memories seem to dance with each other, as we found ways to open the circle and let others step in, until I am not sure which of the things I remember happened to me and which I only heard about. The wild figures in the fields, on the edge of sight. The late night tellings that bewitched us around the fire. The daylight stories of loss and pride, still fresh and urgent on the tellers’ faces. The music that picked up at the place where words ran out. The rhythm of rain on the roof of a marquee. Thirty people penned inside a square of rope to reenact the memory of a Russian prison cell. The sharpening of a scythe. Laughter and fooling and horns and antlers. At the end of everything, a singer’s voice going up into the night.

    Someone said, one Sunday morning, almost embarrassed, that this was the closest thing they had to going to church. All along, it was there, the awkward presence of something no other language seemed fit for, the wariness of a language that so easily turns to dust on the tongue. Here is one way that I have explained it to myself. A taboo, in the full sense, is something other than a reasonable modern legal prohibition: it is a thing forbidden because it is sacred and it may, under appropriately sacred circumstances, be permitted, even required. Now, the space that we opened together, as participants, was a space in which certain taboos had been lifted: some that are strong in the kinds of society we have grown up in, some that have been stronger still in the kinds of movement many of us have been active in. Not the obvious taboos on physical gratification—most of what they covered is now not prohibited so much as required, in this postmodern economy of desire—but the taboo on darknesses and doubts, on naming our losses, failures, fears, uncertainties and exhaustions. In response to our earliest attempts to articulate what Dark Mountain might be, people we knew—good, dedicated people—would tell us, ‘OK, so you’ve burned out. It happens. But there’s no need to do it in public and encourage others to give up.’ Instead, it seemed, one should find a quiet place to be alone with the disillusionment. Perhaps become an aromatherapist. If I have any clue where the power of Dark Mountain came from—knowing that it came from somewhere other than the two of us who wrote the manifesto—then I would say it came from creating a space in which our darknesses can be spoken to each other. (From here, among much else, we may begin to question why the movements we have been involved in seem accustomed to use people as a kind of fuel.) By the second or third year of the festival, though, I found myself wondering if the sacred nature of taboo might not work both ways. If a group of people creates a space in which taboos are lifted, perhaps this in itself is enough to invoke the forms of experience for which the language of the sacred has often been used?

    That is how I have explained it to myself, at least, for now; and if there is any truth in such an explanation, then it bears also on the role of those who take responsibility for creating such a space. We did not know, when we agreed—rather lightly—to that original invitation to host a weekend in Llangollen, that what we were creating was nothing so safe as a programme of talks, workshops and performances. Those elements were there, but they leave out much of what mattered most to those to whom the festival came to matter. The other, harder to name elements, which seem to have something to do with the sacred, call for another order of responsibility. The hard thing is not to create a space in which taboos can be broken, but to do it without people getting broken.

    I have been reading stories from the 1960s, counterculture stories, uncomfortable reading, because there are things I want to understand better about the much-mythologised moment in which all that took place. There are plenty of broken taboos in those stories, and no end of broken people. By comparison, we were weekend amateurs, going nowhere near so high or so hard or so fast, but someone who had been through those years and lived to tell the tales told me this festival was the closest he had known to a reawakening of what he knew back then. If so, then here is confirmation that the taboos in which there is power today are of a different kind, for there is more hedonistic excess on a Saturday night in any high street in England than there was in four years of our Uncivilisation.

    In the end, I think we learned to carry the responsibility, to hold this kind of space with care, though it took the wisdom of others who joined us at the heart of the festival-making. Nothing in the process of writing prepares you for such work, for a writer’s responsibilities are as bounded as the binding of a book, and the space from which writing comes is a solitary one.

    We didn’t set out to start a festival, a festival happened to us. From those who came to it, we learned more about what Dark Mountain might be and what it might mean than we could ever have done at our desks. It felt good to have created it—and it feels good now to have brought it to an end. After all, there are reasons why no one tries to start a publishing operation and an annual festival as part of the same small new non-profit business in the same year. Somehow, we got away with it, although the price was paid in the fraying of our wits, and also in the inevitable carelessnesses—most of them small, but none of them unimportant—that happen when you are always trying to do too much at once. There are also reasons why a journal which is increasingly international, and not exactly enthusiastic about air travel, might not want to spend half its year organising a single event in the south of England.

    For the next while, then, we are going to concentrate on doing one thing and doing it with the care it deserves, the thing we thought we were doing in the first place: bringing together books like the one you hold in your hands. We brought Uncivilisation to an end while it still felt like a joy rather than a duty. But the sparks from all those late night campfires carried further and there are friends of Dark Mountain organising events in the Scottish lowlands, the former coalfields of South Yorkshire and no doubt other corners of the world.

    When the horns had sounded and the thank you’s and goodbye’s had been shouted through the downpour, a circle of friends sat for a few minutes in the shelter of a yurt. We sat quietly, the silence broken after a few moments, as one after another spoke about what he or she had taken from being part of Uncivilisation. Few of us had met before that first gathering in Llangollen and our stories echoed something I have heard over and over, from people who came every year and from people who came only once. A feeling of being less alone. For all the intensity of the mountain-top moments, what stays with us, what carries us through life, is this, the quiet magic of friendship.

    First published in Dark Mountain: Issue 5.

  • How Can We Be Bored When We Have Google?

    On my morning bus into town, every teenager and every grown-up sits there staring into their little infinity machine: a pocket-sized window onto more words than any of us could ever read, more music than we could ever listen to, more pictures of people getting naked than we could ever get off to. Until a few years ago, it was unthinkable, this cornucopia of information. Those of us who were already more or less adults when it arrived wonder at how different it must be to be young now. ‘How can any kid be bored when they have Google?’ I remember hearing someone ask.

    The question came back to me recently when I read about a 23-year-old British woman sent to prison for sending rape threats to a feminist campaigner over Twitter. Her explanation for her actions was that she was ‘off her face’ and ‘bored’. It was an ugly case, but not an isolated one. Internet trolling has started to receive scholarly attention – in such places as the Journal of Politeness Research and its counterpart, the Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict – and ‘boredom’ is a frequently cited motive for such behaviour.

    It is not only among the antisocial creatures who lurk under the bridges of the internet that boredom persists. We might no longer have the excuse of a lack of stimulation, but the vocabulary of tedium is not passing into history: the experience remains familiar to most of us. This leads to a question that goes deep into internet culture and the assumptions with which our infinity machines are packaged: exactly what is it that we are looking for?

    ‘Information wants to be free’ declared Stewart Brand, 30 years ago now. Cut loose from its original context, this phrase became one of the defining slogans of internet politics. With idealism and dedication, the partisans of the network seek to liberate information from governments and corporations, who of course have their own ideas about the opportunities its collection and control might afford. Yet the anthropomorphism of Brand’s rallying cry points to a stronger conviction that runs through much of this politics: that information is itself a liberating force.

    This conviction gets its charge, I suspect, from the role that these technologies played as a refuge for the Californian counterculture of the 1960s. Brand himself embodies the line that connects the two: showing up to meet Ken Kesey out of jail in the opening of Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968) – ‘a thin blond guy with a blazing disk on his forehead… an Indian bead necktie on bare skin and a white butcher’s coat with medals from the King of Sweden on it’ – then creating the Whole Earth Catalog, the bible of the back-to-the-land movement, or, as Steve Jobs would later call it, ‘Google in paperback form’.

    Before there was a web for search engines to index, Brand had co-founded the WELL (the ‘Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link’), a bulletin board launched from the Whole Earth offices in 1985. Its members pushed through the limitations of the available technology to discover something resembling a virtual community. At the core of this group were veterans of the Farm, one of the few hippie communes to outlast the early years of idealism and chaos; in the WELL, these and other paisley-shirted pioneers shared their experiences with the people who would go on to found the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 1990 and Wired magazine in 1993.

    This line from counterculture to cyberculture is not the only one we can draw through the prehistory of our networked age, nor is it necessarily the most important. But it carried a disproportionate weight in the formation of the culture and politics of the web. When the internet moved out of university basements and into public consciousness in the 1990s, it was people such as Brand, Kevin Kelly (founding editor of Wired) and John Perry Barlow (founding member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation) who were able to combine the experience of years spent in spaces such as the WELL with the ability to tell strong, simple stories about what this was and why it mattered.

    The journalist John Markoff, himself an early contributor to the WELL, gave a broader history of how the counterculture shaped personal computing in his book What the Dormouse Said (2005). As any Jefferson Airplane fan can tell you, what the Dormouse said was: ‘Feed your head! Feed your head!’ The internet needed a story that would make sense to those who would never be interested in the TCP/IP protocol, and the counterculture survivors gave it one – the great escapist myth of their era: turn on, tune in, drop out. In this new version of the fable, information took the place of LSD, the magic substance whose consumption could transform the world.

    The trouble is that information doesn’t nourish us. Worse, in the end, it turns out to be boring.

    A writer friend was asked to join a pub quiz team in the village where he has lived for more than half a century. ‘You know lots of things, Alan,’ said the neighbour who invited him. The neighbour had a point: Alan is the most alarmingly knowledgeable person I know. Still, he declined politely, and was bemused for days. There can be a certain point-scoring pleasure in demonstrating the stockpile of facts one has accumulated, but it is in every other sense a pointless kind of knowledge.

    This is more than just intellectual snobbery. Knowledge has a point when we start to find and make connections, to weave stories out of it, stories through which we make sense of the world and our place within it. It is the difference between memorising the bus timetable for a city you will never visit, and using that timetable to explore a city in which you have just arrived. When we follow the connections – when we allow the experience of knowing to take us somewhere, accepting the risk that we will be changed along the way – knowledge can give rise to meaning. And if there is an antidote to boredom, it is not information but meaning.

    There is a connection, though, between the two. Information is perhaps the rawest material in the process out of which we arrive at meaning: an undifferentiated stream of sense and nonsense in which we go fishing for facts. But the journey from information to meaning involves more than simply filtering the signal from the noise. It is an alchemical transformation, always surprising. It takes skill, time and effort, practice and patience. No matter how experienced we become, success cannot be guaranteed. In most human societies, there have been specialists in this skill, yet it can never be the monopoly of experts, for it is also a very basic, deeply human activity, essential to our survival. If boredom has become a sickness in modern societies, this is because the knack of finding meaning is harder to come by.

    It is only fair to note that the internet is not altogether to blame for this, and that the rise of boredom itself goes back to an earlier technological revolution. The word was invented around the same time as the spinning jenny. As the philosophers Barbara Dalle Pezze and Carlo Salzani put it in their essay ‘The Delicate Monster’ (2009):

    Boredom is not an inherent quality of the human condition, but rather it has a history, which began around the 18th century and embraced the whole Western world, and which presents an evolution from the 18th to the 21st century.

    For all its boons, the industrial era itself brought about an endemic boredom peculiar to the division of labour, the distancing of production from consumption, and the rationalisation of working activity to maximise output.

    My point is not that we should return to some romanticised preindustrial past: I mean only to draw attention to contradictions that still shape our post-industrial present. The physical violence of the 19th-century factory might be gone, at least in the countries where industrialisation began, but the alienation inherent in these ways of organising work remains.

    When the internet arrived, it seemed to promise a liberation from the boredom of industrial society, a psychedelic jet-spray of information into every otherwise tedious corner of our lives. In fact, at its best, it is something else: a remarkable helper in the search for meaningful connections. But if the deep roots of boredom are in a lack of meaning, rather than a shortage of stimuli, and if there is a subtle, multilayered process by which information can give rise to meaning, then the constant flow of information to which we are becoming habituated cannot deliver on such a promise. At best, it allows us to distract ourselves with the potentially endless deferral of clicking from one link to another. Yet sooner or later we wash up downstream in some far corner of the web, wondering where the time went. The experience of being carried on these currents is quite different to the patient, unpredictable process that leads towards meaning.

    The latter requires, among other things, space for reflection – allowing what we have already absorbed to settle, waiting to see what patterns emerge. Find the corners of our lives in which we can unplug, the days on which it is possible to refuse the urgency of the inbox, the activities that will not be rushed. Switch off the infinity machine, not forever, nor because there is anything bad about it, but out of recognition of our own finitude: there is only so much information any of us can bear, and we cannot go fishing in the stream if we are drowning in it. As any survivor of the 1960s counterculture could tell us, it is best to treat magic substances with respect – and to be careful about the dosage.

    Published on AEON.

  • The Fairly Big Society

    The Fairly Big Society

    Whatever became of the Big Society? It still gets mentioned, sometimes, as a joke: its humourless punchline, the lengthening queues at volunteer-run food banks. At Westminster, the Tories forgot their flirtation with social capital, localism, community organising and got down to the business of cutting, privatising, outsourcing, fracking and inflating a new housing bubble. So David Cameron’s one-time big idea gets written off as a warm fuzzy makeover for the Thatcherite desire to shrink the state, the kind of neoliberalism from which an independent Scotland might hope to liberate itself. Yet this obituary misses what is worst about the mess that was the Big Society. The Tories did not simply invent a half-baked cover story, they took other people’s ideas for a joyride, then smashed them into the dead end of their own ideology. The challenge now is to salvage what is worth saving of those ideas from the wreckage.

    The suggestion that there is anything worth saving will probably be met with scepticism. The first hurdle against which the Big Society fell was the inability of even its supporters to explain it. Tony Blair’s Third Way had been many things, but not incomprehensible: it stood for a merger of market choice and state provision; a pragmatic compromise, according to which the old positions of right and left had become an anachronism. The Big Society was more puzzling; rather than propose a new deal between market and state, it insisted on the importance of something which was neither one nor the other, and which it could not define in terms which would explain its importance. In the absence of such an explanation, it was left enthusing over an easily-parodied mixture of the Women’s Institute and Wikipedia.

    The paradox of the Big Society is that it could only have made sense in the light of an admission that was surely beyond the imaginations of those responsible for it: the admission that we are already in, and headed inexorably further into, an historical moment defined by the failure of both the market and the state. It is in such a context that forms of social production which lie beyond the grasp of market and state may well take on an importance that they have not had for generations.

    Underlying this argument is a take on our situation which many will find troubling: that we are caught in a web of crises that have been exacerbated by—but cannot be reduced to—the consequences of neoliberalism. For any of us who have felt the destructiveness of those consequences—the upward redistribution of wealth, the dismantling of public institutions, the abandonment of whole communities, the narrowing of any sense of the social good—this sits uncomfortably, since it seems to let those responsible off the hook. The point is not to mitigate for them, however, but to recognise them for the opportunists they were (and are). The destruction is real enough, still ongoing and to be resisted, and yet it does not follow that, in their absence, we could have sustained something resembling the social democratic settlement of the post-war era—still less, that we could reassemble anything resembling that settlement, starting from the mess in which we find ourselves.

    In historical terms, the neoliberals did not inherit a fully-functioning version of the post-war model: the rising and broadly-shared prosperity of its golden decades had given way to stagnation and inflation, the crisis of the 1970s that would be their opportunity. Having seized it, their ideological attachment to the market blinded them to the primary function of the state: to save capitalism from its own destructive tendencies. Even where it acts to constrain the immediate interests of capital, the state is not so much the enemy of the market as its life-support system. Lacking any feel for this, their policies succeeded in destabilising both. All the more reason, some would argue, for a return to social democratic sanity: except that reason alone was not the basis for the achievements of the post-war era, they were underwritten by the power of organised labour, and it is far from clear today what could constitute an equivalent source of power.

    It is in this context that it makes sense to speak of a failure of state and market, not as an apocalyptic prediction, but an attempt to describe a reality that has been playing out in the lives of more and more people and communities for decades. Neither side is delivering on its promises, as we have slid from societies of mass prosperity to societies of mass precarity, with no route back to the future that once seemed to be on offer.

    As this slide continues, however, another element comes into play, because the state and the market share a common weakness: they have rarely been able to draw on what is best in us. The truth of this is contained in the old saying, ‘One volunteer is worth ten pressed men.’ Yet this truth has been diluted, since the language of volunteering now suggests selflessness and ‘doing good’ for others, so that we are in need of another term to express the power that comes when we act out of our own free will. For there are reserves of enthusiasm, dedication and deep pragmatism which people draw on when they come together to do things for their own reasons, rather than because they have been paid or told to do them—reserves to which neither the state nor the market generally has access.

    The worst thing about the Big Society is that—in its half-baked, more-than-half-cynical way—it sought to draw on these reserves, and risks to have poisoned the well instead. Its failure could extend the life expectancy of a model of politics which frames society in terms of the axis of state and market. Yet if it is true that we are now in a situation where neither the state nor the market can secure the kind of mass prosperity they once seemed to offer, then a flourishing of new forms of social production—many of them voluntary in the older, deeper sense of the word—may be our best hope of having societies worth growing old in, a generation from now.

    On the edges, at the grassroots—among the geeks and hackers, but also where people’s memories are longest—clues to what such a society might look like are starting to come together. It was to some of these edges that Cameron’s advisors came, scouting for ideas—and if what they came back with seemed half-baked, that was true. There is not a ready-to-go plan for how to reorganise a society along these lines: rather, these ideas are still forming, born out of people’s attempts to improvise responses to the ongoing failure of the market-state duopoly in the places where we find ourselves.

    Quite how existing public institutions, scarred by a generation of neoliberalism, begin to engage constructively, on a large scale, with ways of working that are at odds with many of their assumptions—this is a question that none of us will answer alone. It may well take a rupture on the scale of starting a new country to allow the room for the imagination required to embark, collectively, on such a project. It will require a renegotiation of ideas about work and a willingness to relinquish the safety of professional identities. Above all, it will require an attention to how people feel about their situation, to their sense of meaning and justice, that becomes uncommon in environments shaped by the power of the state or the power of money—for the society worth working for is one that is not just big, but fairly big.

    Published in Closer, a one-off newspaper from the editors of Bella Caledonia.

  • The Crossing of Two Lines

    The Crossing of Two Lines

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

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

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

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

    * * *

    ‘So when did Robert convert?’

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

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

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

    * * *

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

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

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

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

    * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

    * * *

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

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

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

    * * *

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

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

  • Commoning in the City

    Commoning in the City

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Published as the cover story of STIR: Issue 2.

  • The Regeneration of Meaning

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

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

    Reinventing Collapse, p.122-3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    First published in Baltic Edge (Global Utmaning).

  • Organisations That Matter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Originally published on the Collapsonomics blog.