DOUGALD HINE

Tag: Ivan Illich

  • Deschooling Revisited

    Deschooling Revisited

    I grew up in a town in the northeast of England. Billy and I met at the local comprehensive, hanging out in the music department at lunchtime, a quiet corner where we would eat our sandwiches, teach ourselves to play the guitar, and keep out of the way of the hurlyburly that comes with keeping 1,500 hormonal adolescents cooped up alongside one another for a large part of their waking hours. Over the course of our teens, I watched his self-taught musicianship soar beyond my basic busking and came to the conclusion that I’d rather be a writer than a rock star, anyway, because you had a better chance of living past the age of 27.

    Neither of us had heard of Ivan Illich, but when I discovered Deschooling Society in my mid-twenties, it gave words to things we’d known instinctively a decade earlier. There is an innate human capacity for learning, we are not dependent on learning transmitted from professionally accredited teachers, and the primary social function of the schooling system is to shape us for and assign us a place within the existing social order of the world. 

    This last lesson is mostly taught indirectly, by implication, but now and then you get a straight look at what you’re up against. Towards the end of Year 10, they would ship us all out on work experience for a couple of weeks, timed to quieten the place down while the year above sat their GCSEs – and perhaps also to chasten us into studying harder on our return so as to postpone our entry into regular employment. By that stage, Billy had developed a sideline in filmmaking and he’d arranged a placement with the video workshop at the back of the local arts centre. On the Friday before it was due to start, there was a hitch, some paperwork that was needed for insurance purposes. He spent the afternoon running around the school, tracking down the teacher who needed to sign off first one form and then another, and the second time around, this teacher snapped. ‘Why can’t you just go and do your work experience in an office like everybody else?’ she said. ‘After all, it’s what you’ll be doing for the rest of your life.’

    At this point, I’m obliged to insert a disclaimer that the woman in question had doubtless had a shitty day, and not all teachers think this way about their students – and of course I’ve known wonderful teachers, not to mention wonderful people who tried working as teachers and were burned out by the system.

    But it’s the system Illich has in his sights – and for him, it is beyond reform. What’s wrong with our schools is not that they are too liberal or too conservative, too hidebound or trendy in their curricula. For a strongly motivated student, he writes at one point, there are many skills where the discipline of drill teaching and learning by rote is preferable. The problem is that we have structured a society in which huge amounts of resources go into educational institutions which work against the grain of motivation, which initiate us into a needy dependence on scarce commodities – and which lend a rubber stamp of meritocracy to the perpetuation of privilege, since access to desirable fields of work is routinely subject to discrimination on the grounds of how many years the applicant has spent in formal education, whether or not the education in question has any connection to the skills actually required for the job. Needless to say, the strongest indicator of how many years of education an individual is likely to complete is the educational and financial privilege of their parents.

    Deschooling Society was written in the early 1970s and some parts of Illich’s analysis have aged better than others. His vision for ‘learning webs’, using a database system to connect learners outside of institutions, may seem prophetic of the internet age (and inspired the web startup I co-founded in the 2000s), but by the end of his life Illich himself had become deeply sceptical of the hope invested in networked technologies.

    On the other hand, revisiting this book in early 2019 – with the Fridays For the Future school strikes spreading across 130 countries – his idea that school might be the most hopeful location from which revolutionary change could erupt seems less quixotic than it did to his fellow revolutionaries in the 1970s. ‘The risks of a revolt against school are unforeseeable,’ he writes, ‘but they are not as horrible as those of a revolution starting in any other major institution … The weapons of the truant officer … might turn out to be powerless against the surge of a mass movement.’

    Meanwhile, this summer it will be 25 years since we sat our GCSEs. Not long ago I was invited to a Facebook group for organising a reunion. It’s fair to say my life has taken a different direction to most of those I was at school with, but as we each shared the potted version of what happened on the way to our forties, I was struck by how many of the stories involved dropping out of college or university, or following a course that led nowhere, until somewhere further into adulthood you’d find something that actually felt like you – and maybe even go back to school for the necessary study or training. Only this time around, you were there for your own reasons.

    First published in STIR: Issue 25.

  • The Friendly Society: On Cooperation, Utopia, Friendship & the Commons

    We are looking at a photograph from Amsterdam, 1868, thirty or so men in black and white. Even in the flesh, they would be black and white: black overcoats with blacker collars, faces pale as November and framed by various symmetries of facial hair, top hats like a row of chimneys. Despite what the hats might suggest, these men are workers, craftsmen, dressed in their Sunday clothes, outside a cafe called The Swan. They stand formally, the members of an association shortly to constitute itself as the Construction Society for the Acquisition of One’s Home. On its first night, hundreds more will join. By spring, the membership will have passed two thousand.

    Their gaze presents us with a question, and the way I remember it, our conversation in Gothenburg was an attempt to put this question into words. Ana and Marc framed it for us first, with images of abandoned, half-built housing blocks in a Spain where someone is evicted every fifteen minutes. They traced a line along which the cooperative associations of the early socialist movement had been absorbed into the great public housing programmes of the mid-20th century, only for their achievements to be liquidated in the neoliberal decades that followed, leading to the current crisis. Why is it, they asked, that we struggle to find the confidence to remake reality that we see in the actions of these men?

    Running through this discussion was a yearning for and an unease with utopias. The shadows of futures past—made concrete in the geometries of Biljemeer, Tensta, Novi Beograd or Park Hill—lean over us. The drawings of La Città Nuova look so familiar, it is hard to imagine the promise they once held. After the failure of the planned utopia, can there be a utopia from below—something improvised, emergent? Are our improvisational, networked ways of working really capable of building anything strong and lasting?

    Into this conversation, Kim brought another current of history: the stories of the commons of preindustrial England and their enclosure. Unfamiliar words evoke the strangeness of these ways of living with each other and with the land. If the workers’ movements of the later 19th century mark the beginning of one story, they also belong to the ending of another. As I have written elsewhere:

    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-water-marks 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.⁠

    The swelling of the cities was driven by the loss of earlier possibilities for living with the land. (In England, the process of enclosing common land was generally referred to as ‘Improvement’ by those who organised and profited from it.) In the seminar, Kim talked about the persistence and reemergence of customary practices among the displaced, even in the new context of the city.⁠ New laws were required to proscribe activities which, because they took place outside the monetised economy, were illegible to both state and market.

    As the conversation went on, Kim brought us back around to those men in Amsterdam. How could they trust each other enough to realise a thing like the Construction Society together, to rely on each other for something as fundamental as meeting the need for shelter and living space? ‘Perhaps what we are really asking is, how can two thousand people become friends with each other?’ (In English-speaking countries, the mutual associations of this time were often known as ‘Friendly Societies’.)

    By now, a set of words had started to form a constellation on my notepad: friendship, utopia, commons, public, cooperative. In the relationship between them was a provisional answer to the question we had been circling around. What follows is a first attempt at spelling out that provisional answer, though perhaps it is best read as a rough sketch for a more ambitious project.

    The connection between friendship and the commons had been put into my mind by the Mexican intellectual and activist Gustavo Esteva. During a conversation we filmed in December 2012, he returned twice to the suggestion that friendship was the key to the possibility of new commons. ‘If you want to abandon that feeling of precarity, then it’s to rediscover that the only way to have a kind of security is at the grassroots. With your friends. With the kinds of new commons emerging everywhere.’⁠ Particularly in Europe, particularly in the urban context, he emphasised, if we want to talk about commons we should start with friendship. Since this is not where people usually start, and since friendship hardly sounds solid enough to be a starting point that will be taken seriously, these comments stuck with me.

    At the Commoning the City conference in Stockholm in April 2013, I spoke about this, and suggested that one reason for starting with friendship is that it gets us beyond the idea of a commons as a pool of resources. Anthony McCann has observed that ‘resource-management models’ of the commons mirror the arguments made historically by the defenders of enclosure: these discourses, he argues, ‘tend to work more in the spirit of a Trojan horse than an analytic tool.’⁠ In contrast to the discourses of resource-management, Ivan Illich made the distinction between ‘commons within which people’s subsistence activities are embedded, and resources that serve for the economic production of those commodities on which modern survival depends.’⁠ To see the world as made up of resources is already to have enclosed it in one’s mind, to reduce it to a stockpile of raw materials to be exploited for the production of commodities. Illich adds that the English language ‘during the last 100 years has lost the ability to make this distinction’. Certainly, there is little left that is not considered capable of being treated as a resource: the ecological crisis is to be solved through total ecological accounting, while we rarely think twice about the presence of ‘Human Resources’ departments within companies and organisations. In this context, friendship is an exception, one area of human experience where we still have a shared language to express the sense that not everything can or should be viewed as a resource: when someone we thought of as a friend treats us this way, we say, ‘I feel used.’

    There is another sense in which friendship illuminates the nature of commons, as we come to the distinction between ‘commons’ and ‘public’, two terms frequently used as if their meanings overlap. Instead of treating them as interchangeable, it might be more helpful to think of them as characterised by two rather different logics, founded on differing presuppositions and leading to differing atmospheres.

    A typical definition of something ‘public’—public space, the public sphere—will emphasise that ‘access is guaranteed to all’, in contrast to the private, which is by its nature ‘closed or exclusive’.⁠ The twin concepts of public and private are often seen as corresponding to the collective and the individual. This is most obvious when the terms are transposed to the political-economic structure of public and private sectors—and so to a model of politics in which the left is associated with the public and the right with the private. In a deeper sense, however, both concepts rest on an idea of the individual as possessed of certain rights that exist prior to and override the social context in which she happens to find herself.

    This kind of individualism was hardly thinkable much before the 18th century, when the concepts of public and private took shape. The high version of this story—the version that animates Richard Sennett’s The Fall of Public Man, for example—treats the emergence of the public sphere in this period as among the great achievements of the Enlightenment and, indeed, of human history.⁠ There is a lower version to be told, however; one which sits less awkwardly with the recollection that this was also the century in which the enclosure of common lands reached its greatest intensity. In this version, we might recognise—among other things—that public space is, often literally, the subdued remnant of an older commons. A striking late example of this is the enclosure of Kennington Common, the site of the largest and last of the Chartist mass meetings in 1848; within four years, legislation had been passed to create Kennington Park, fenced and patrolled by guards under the command of the Royal Commissioners. (The artist and Kennington resident Stefan Szczelkun makes the fascinating suggestion that the curiously anonymous monuments, lacking plaques or dedications, erected during its emparkment seem to have been ‘placed strategically… just far enough from the sites of public executions and mass rallies to misdirect attention and focus from those emotive and resonant sites.’⁠ There is an analogy lurking here to the anonymity and seemingly random deployment of public art in today’s cities.)

    There seems to be a paradox by which the concept of the public, with its guarantee of access to all, is realised through the creation of boundaries of a new hardness. In the case of Kennington Park, we have a modern public space created through legislative and physical enclosure. A more general example is the establishment of public services provided on a basis of universal access, which has entailed the hardening of the boundaries of citizenship which form the practical limit to the ideal of universality. In contrast, if the historical commons were unfenced, this never implied that they were simply open to all. There were rights of use in the commons, but these were not universal: rather, they were deeply specific, a fabric of interwoven agreements, subject to an ongoing process of negotiation. This is the customary law that Illich describes: ‘It was unwritten law 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.’⁠

    The absence of any commitment to universality in the logic of the commons sounds alarming, since—within the logic of the public—the alternative would seem to be exclusion. It is here that the example of friendship may help us discern the difference between these logics. If I claim that I have a right to be your friend, this makes no sense. The dance of sociability by which the possibility of friendship is explored takes a multitude of forms, but it can neither be rushed nor predicted.

    The logic of the commons resembles the logic of friendship, in that it is based neither on an a priori openness, nor a set of a priori criteria which determine exclusion. The journey by which a newcomer may be drawn into the web of relations which form a commons—that ‘reality much too complex to fit into paragraphs’—is determined through what happens between the people present, rather than by the application of prescribed principles. The ideal of a universal guarantee of access makes no sense here, yet nor is there anything that resembles the erection of a hard boundary of exclusion.

    The logic of the public appeals to something higher and more constant than the vulnerable threads of human relationships; but in normalising such an appeal, it has a tendency to cut through the fabric which those threads make up. The individual possessed of a set of rights begins as a fiction, contemporary and in other ways parallel to the figure of Robinson Crusoe which has held such an enduring appeal for economists.⁠

    But such fictions have a way of coming to life: the attempt to realise a society based on such rights has often framed our highest aspirations for social justice, even if the reality has fallen short, but it has also been accompanied by the creation of societies characterised by an unprecedented individualism and atomisation. We pursue the circumstances of loneliness, even as those who study public health have started to describe it as ‘an epidemic’.⁠

     The logic of the commons, according to which rights are negotiated within human relationships, rests on another understanding of the individual, one which is closer to that of Raimon Pannikar: ‘I understand a person as “a knot in a net” of relationships.’⁠

    If it makes sense to distinguish the logics of public and commons in the way that I have done so far, it is worth touching on a further aspect of this distinction, in relation to ‘space’ and ‘place’. The space of the public is Cartesian: an abstract, homogeneous, measurable void which preexists its actual contents, just as the individual (within this logic) is treated as preexisting the actual context of social relations in which she finds herself. In contrast, the commons is always somewhere, a specific place, just as its rights and laws are specific.⁠

    In this sense, among others, the logic of the public is utopian—literally, ‘placeless’—and this can be seen in one of the fullest attempts to realise its ambitions, the commune movement of the 1960s counterculture. In many ways, of course, this movement was an attempt to create a refuge from the kind of modern society which we might more often think of as embodying the logic of the public, but the refugees took with them certain core assumptions—and these played a critical role in how their dreams went wrong. Lou Gottlieb founded the commune at Morning Star Ranch in 1966, declaring it to be ‘Land access to which is denied no one’. After Time magazine turned its spotlight on the hippie phenomenon in July 1967, the numbers of newcomers arriving at the ranch grew beyond its ability to cope: the site became overwhelmed, struggling with open sewers and the hostility of the Sonoma County authorities. In 1972, at the end of a series of court cases, all but one of the buildings were bulldozed.⁠ Iain Boal adds a speculative twist to this story, pointing out that Garrett Hardin was writing his ill-founded yet hugely influential paper, ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, in California in 1968 as the story of the Morning Star court hearings was on the front page of his morning newspaper.⁠ Hardin’s account of why commons are doomed to fail bears no relation to the actual history of the commons, but it does resemble what Boal calls ‘the tragedy of the communes’.⁠ The essence of that tragedy—as seen through the lens I have been grinding away at here—is the attempt to realise, in its full utopian form, the promise of universal access which is alien to the historical phenomenon of the commons but intrinsic to the logic of the public.

    One further example from the movements that came out of the 1960s counterculture illustrates the converse of the connection between friendship and the commons, the suspicion of friendship within the logic of the public. ‘The Tyranny of Structurelessness’ is a key text from the women’s liberation movement, drawing attention to the ways in which abuse of power takes place within informal, supposedly non-hierarchical groups. Running through it, however, is a striking suspicion of friendship:

    Elites are nothing more and nothing less than a group of friends who also happen to participate in the same political activities. They would probably maintain their friendship whether or not they were involved in political activities; they would probably be involved in political activities whether or not they maintained their friendships. It is the coincidence of these two phenomena which creates elites in any groups and makes them so difficult to break.⁠

    Written in 1970, ‘The Tyranny of Structurelessness’ was an attempt to learn from the failures of the innocence which had guided the experiments of the period to which Morning Star Ranch belongs. It contains a great deal of painfully-won insight. Yet there is a connection to be traced between the way that friendship is problematised here and a more general tendency to treat specific human relationships as interfering with the equality of individuals, as envisioned by the logic of the public: to avoid such interference, friendship should be confined (or at least seen to be confined) to the private sphere.⁠

    The politics of informal groups to which ‘The Tyranny of Structurelessness’ draws attention is real enough and—as Kim reminded us during the seminar—an essential element of the historical commons was ‘a democratic assembly space’ within which to resolve the difficulties and disagreements that arise.⁠ We might question, though, whether friendship need really be so inimical to the social fabric—and whether a logic according to which the key to avoiding the abuse of power is to ‘break’ the connections of friendship is really headed in a direction which we would wish to take.

    How do we find our way back around to the question in the gaze of those workers in Amsterdam, a century and a continent away from the examples we have been considering? The thought that occurred to me during the seminar, and that prompted the scribbled constellation of terms on which I have tried to elaborate here, was about the peculiar position of the cooperative movement in relation to these differing logics of commons and public.

    There is always more than one story to be told about the origins of a movement, but the story most often told about the origins of cooperativism goes back to the experiments of Robert Owen at New Lanark. The waterfalls that powered the imagination of the Romantic poets also drove the first phase of the Industrial Revolution which their more practical contemporaries engineered. A short walk from the Falls of Clyde, which drew visitors such as Coleridge and the Wordsworths, Owen’s mill town straddles the mechanical and the visionary. Its founder belonged to the period described by Karl Polanyi in which practical enterprises were entered into in a spirit of intellectual enquiry, seeking to discover ‘new applications of the universal principles of mutuality, trust, risks, and other elements of human enterprise.’ (By contrast, Polanyi suggests, after the 1830s ‘businessmen imagined they knew what forms their activities should take; they rarely inquired into the nature of money before founding a bank.’⁠)

    If the communards of the 1960s thought that they were walking away from the top-down institutions of modernity, yet took with them the essential logic of the public, Owen’s projects represent a more wholehearted attempt to realise utopia on an institutional scale. When his original investors at New Lanark tired of his philanthropic experiments, he arranged for them to be bought out by a group which included Jeremy Bentham. The plans for a model community at New Harmony, Indiana drawn up for Owen by the architect Thomas Stedman Whitwell belong to the genre of the panopticon, even if the reality of the settlement—which failed within two years—was closer to the experience of Morning Star Ranch.⁠ His earlier proposal to put the poor into ‘Villages of Cooperation’ met with resistance from popular Radicals and trade unions for whom, in E.P. Thompson’s words:

    The Plan smelled of Malthus and of those rigorous experiments of magistrates … who were already working out the Chadwickian plan of economical workhouse relief. Even if Owen was himself … deeply in earnest and dismayed by the distress of the people, his plan, if taken up by Government, would certainly be orientated in this way.⁠

    Owen was ahead of his time in many ways, yet the suspicion with which his plans were viewed also anticipates the shadow side of the real achievements of public provision as accomplished in subsequent generations: the suspicion that what has been achieved is not a liberation, but the rendering sustainable of an exploitation to which we become naturalised.

    To point out that Owen’s own experiments were, by and large, failures is not to deny the significance of his legacy, but it could prompt the question as to why certain ideas with which he had been associated subsequently took on a life of their own. Thompson makes the observation that:

    Owenism from the late Twenties onwards, was a very different thing from the writings and proclamations of Robert Owen … The very imprecision of his theories … made them adaptable to different groups of working people.⁠

    It was this passage that came to mind, as we sat in Gothenburg trying to piece together the histories of the commons and the public, and that led me to add the word ‘cooperative’ to the middle of my scribbled constellation, somewhere between the clusters ‘public, universal, space, utopia’ and ‘commons, specific, place’. This is no more than a speculation, and clearly there were a variety of factors and innovations by which Owen’s ideas about cooperation as well as other experiments, some of them predating New Lanark, fused into the cooperative movement that took shape in the following decades. However, if we are trying to answer the question put to us by the gaze of those workers in Amsterdam—to understand the kind of trust which holds together a Construction Society for the Acquisition of One’s Home, or a Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers, the equivalent of which we struggle to find in our own experience—perhaps it is significant that these associations were formed at a time when the practices of commoning were still within living memory among the newly urbanised?⁠ Were these self-organised institutions—organised in response to the torn fabric of rapidly industrialising societies, and which we can see as anticipating the vastly larger systems of the following century—made possible because of the living memory of older customary practices? If so, we could think of the cooperative movement as a meeting point, straddling the boundary: conceived (at least by Owen) within the logic of the public, but brought to life by something that could well be called a heritage of commons.

    First published in Heritage as Common(s): Common(s) as Heritage,University of Gothenburg Press, 2015. This essay responds to the papers given by Ana Dzokic and Marc Neelen (STEALTH.unlimited) and Kim Trogall (University of Sheffield) at a seminar at the Gothenburg School of Design & Crafts.

  • The Limits to Measurement: A Conversation With Christopher Brewster

    The Limits to Measurement: A Conversation With Christopher Brewster

    These days, people talk a lot about ‘the art of hosting’, but that is only one half of the dance of hospitality: there is an art of guesting, too. I can say this with conviction, because I have been a lousy guest, in my time, and lately I’ve had the luck to live with someone who teaches me to notice the things that make a person easy to have around: the moments at which an artful guest steps forward with a gentle insistence, the moments of well-timed withdrawal. Perhaps because he is one of life’s wanderers, Christopher Brewster has mastered this art. If I picture him now, it is standing in our kitchen, chopping vegetables at speed and maintaining an unbroken conversation while preparing a lunch that will show the influence of the years he lived in Greece.

    He could be a classicist or a philosopher—either of those things seems more probable, from his manner, than that he should be a computer scientist working in a business school. In fact, as he touches on near the start of this conversation, his route into computer science came through the philosophy of language, and it was his feel for the ways of thinking embedded in digital technology that suggested the theme around which we wandered together.

    It was the spring of 2014, my first year in Västerås, a middle-sized city by a lake in central Sweden. A string of friends had invited themselves to visit, so that I had taken to telling people, ‘We’re running a residency programme in our spare room.’ It occurred to me that a residency programme should really include a public events series, so one afternoon, I wandered into the local branch of the Workers’ Learning Association and a week later sixteen of us were gathered in their foyer for the first of what became eight weeks of Västerås Conversations. Our first guest was Anthony McCann, talking about tradition, the commons and the politics of gentleness. From week to week, certain themes would loop back: hospitality; friendship; the challenge of speaking up for things that are hard to measure or adequately define.

    What follows is an unfaithful transcript of the fourth of those conversations. We have taken the opportunity to straighten out our more crooked sentences and to fill in details where memory failed us at the time. Still, what emerges from this process should be read as a sample from a larger conversation: both the relay of stories and ideas that ran over those eight weeks in Västerås and the ongoing conversation that is my friendship with Christopher. 

    It is a friendship that began at one of the handful of conferences I have been to where people seemed to be there to listen to each other; a conference whose theme was ‘the university in transition’ and the possibility of new, radical spaces of learning growing at the edges of a dysfunctional system. It seems appropriate, then, that our friendship should have become a strand in a web of convivial conversations that form a kind of ‘invisible college’ in which many of us have found nourishment over the years since. This text and the other Västerås Conversations are among the visible manifestations of that web.

    DH: If we’re going to talk about the measurable and the unmeasurable, perhaps we could start with this observation: to a computer, the world is made up of numbers, while to a human being, that is not the case. Yet the more inseparable they become from our lives, the more likely we are to fall into ways of thinking which do treat the world as made of numbers, even though this is not our experience. 

    Now, do you agree with that as a starting point?

    CB: As a starting point, yes, but the story is more complex. When I first set out on my PhD, I remember meeting a man who said, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if we could make human language behave like a programming language—if we could reach that level of precision?’ And my response is that this would be a complete loss, because it’s exactly the ‘failures’ of human language that are its virtue. So the fact that human language is ambiguous and vague is a feature, rather than a bug.

    Computers are precise. It’s the digital nature of computers that gives the particular effect that we observe. They require everything to fit into either-or categories. This goes back into the intellectual heritage of computer science, which originates partly in logic and partly in mathematics. And because of this logical heritage which is physically embodied in the transistors and the physical hardware, it has been natural for computer scientists to wish to analyse the world in logical terms. They have been deeply influenced by thinkers like Frege and Carnap who believed that one could represent the world completely in logic. That remains to this day a fundamental, if very often tacit, assumption about all activity in computer science, whether at the theoretical end or in the development of business systems where you believe that you can have an enterprise resource management system that can put people into different categories and then describe the world in a perfect manner.

    DH: So what you’re saying is that the way that computers represent the world has a heritage in particular areas of philosophy—particular ways of thinking about the world that are by no means the only ones available. Yet since these machines are now everywhere and intertwined with our lives to such an extraordinary extent, they carry these ways of thinking into our lives, they shape the way we see the world and the way that we reshape the world?

    CB: Yes. Each computer, each system we use, each piece of software embodies a particular model, a particular perspective on the world—and we tend, in the end, in using these systems to believe the model rather than the world. Whether it’s an accounting system or a personal fitness management system, what happens is that you create a set of categories, a model, and then either things fit or, if they don’t, they tend to be ignored.

    DH: And when you’re interacting with these machines, you either agree to act as if the world is like that, or the interaction with the machine quickly becomes difficult. So, to the extent that we spend a lot of our time dealing with these machines, we have to spend that time agreeing to pretend that the world is more logical and more capable of being reduced to things that can be measured than the full range of our background experience might suggest. And for as long as our focus is held by the machine, that way of seeing the world is being affirmed.

    CB: Part of the problem here is the plasticity of the human mind: our own native ability, agility, flexibility to deal with things. 

    Several years ago I was a reviewer on a research project that concerned the analysis and production of emotions by computers. The idea was that you would construct computer systems that could detect emotions in the voice or gesture of people and that would then produce something that would represent an emotion. They had an example, a system which would have an artificial tree on a screen, and if you spoke to it nicely it would grow and if you spoke to it harshly it would slowly shrink. And they were terribly pleased with this because they said, ‘Look, we have managed to capture human emotion and analyse it in a way so that the tree grows when people are nice and happy and positive…’

    DH: And it will shrink if people are being nasty?

    CB: The trouble is, they didn’t really think about the likelihood that human beings would observe the tree and, within seconds, respond appropriately and figure out how to control the tree. So it had nothing to do with your real state of emotions, but technically it was a brilliant success!

    DH: So, to go back to that conversation from when you were starting out on your PhD, there is this utopian ambition—which people who are enamoured of the ways of thinking embedded in these machines tend towards—which is a belief that the world would be better if we could get rid of the vagueness and achieve the same kind of precision that these machines are capable of?

    CB: Well, this tendency has deep intellectual roots. You can trace it back to Descartes and the Enlightenment, or all the way back to Aristotle’s attempt to enumerate all the possible kinds of things within a fixed set of categories. There has been a repeated attempt throughout western intellectual history to develop a total system of categories that will cover all of human experience. My favourite example is in England, in the mid-17thcentury, when you have people like Francis Lodwick with his project for A Perfect Language. There was a whole movement of ‘philosophical languages’ and at the centre of it was John Wilkins, one of the founders of the Royal Society, who produced this extraordinary taxonomy of every known scientific concept. He founded the Royal Society to ensure the longevity of his project and when he had produced his taxonomy, he told everybody, right, now you have to keep it up to date! And, of course, everybody ignored it. But the tendency continues—and the next step, in the 18thcentury, is Linnaeus from Sweden who produced a taxonomy of all animals and plants, the foundation of the modern biological naming system. So you have a growing sense that, yes, we can describe the world completely.

    DH: We can know the world by having a box for everything!

    CB: In the late 20thcentury, there are innumerable failures. There’s a wonderful project which began in the mid-80s called Cyc which has put hundreds of man-years of work into constructing a logical system to represent the whole of the world. Now, there are some fantastic examples of people trying to use the system and failing completely, yet it carries on—it’s a recurring human ambition. 

    And of course, if you pin a computer scientist to the wall, they will say ‘Well, no, of course we don’t mean to describe the whole world.’ But you see it creeping out in all kinds of ways, even if it’s just a small corner of the world, even if there’s an acknowledgement that we won’t describe the wholeworld in our set of categories—there is still an assumption that those categories will represent reality perfectly.

    The other thing to say is that there is a lot of money riding on this assumption. If you want to find the current version, it goes under the name of ‘smart cities’ or the ‘Internet of Things’, a vision of a world in which everything we interact with is connected to the network. But it has consequences, socially, that people have not yet fully worked out, because what it means is that we are trying to construct systems that will model every aspect of reality. And you need to tell your story of trying to use the electronic toilet…

    DH: Yes, this is about what that interconnected vision looks like in practice. It was six weeks ago. I was at the railway station in Borlänge—a small city in Dalarna, which is Sweden’s answer to Yorkshire—and I needed to use the toilet. There was a toilet there, it was vacant, and there was a keypad on the door. To open the door, you had to put in a code and a notice on the wall explained that, to get a code, you needed to pay 10kr by sending a text message to the number provided. So I sent a text message to pay my 10kr. After a couple of minutes, I got two replies. The first was from the toilet company, telling me my payment had failed. The second was from my Swedish mobile provider, explaining that, in order to make the mobile payment, I needed to download an app. So now I had to get online, find the app, download and install it, then give it my bank card details and approve the safety request from my bank, allowing me to transfer 10kr from my current account into the ‘virtual wallet’ that now existed on my phone and, presumably, somewhere out there in a data-centre. At which point, I could send the text message again, pay my 10kr and get texted back with a code that would open the door—and finally, after twenty minutes, I had access to the toilet. In among all this technological wizardry, the real miracle is that I had managed to perform all these tasks whilst keeping my legs crossed.

    CB: So, this is a perfect example of smart cities! And one consequence is, now the mobile phone company and the app company and possibly the company operating the toilet door all know who has gone to the toilet and when!

    DH: I guess so—or maybe there is some way in which the controlling of access to the toilets is saving the local council money? But I wonder if it’s really that rational, or if it’s just that the idea of the Internet of Things sounds so shiny and new, and whoever was responsible for deciding that the bathroom of Borlänge railway station should be part of it couldn’t envisage the reality of how it would turn out, the reality of the Internet of Toilets?

    I guess what I’m asking is, did anyone ever know what the problem was that this was meant to solve? And maybe we could extend this to the whole project that you’ve been describing, this recurring project to come up with a complete set of categories for describing the world—is it a problem that we don’t have a complete set of categories like that?

    CB: I think it’s very important that we don’t have that set of categories! I’d argue that it’s actually a positive thing. 

    But I think what we’re getting to now is this concept of ‘legibility’, which comes from James C. Scott’s book, Seeing Like A State. And this construction of categories is part of the need that organisations in authority have to describe their territory, to describe their universe. That’s where the ‘problem’ comes from.

    DH: Yes, Scott’s concept of legibility, that the modern state has a great desire and demand for the ability to see and read activity of all kinds from above. He’s talking about the kind of centralised political systems that came about in the past two or three centuries in Europe and were gradually extended across the world. To meet this demand, you need to standardise things, to reduce the complexity to a manageable model. And the classic example that Scott uses is forestry in Germany.

    CB: So in the 18thcentury, in Prussia and Saxony, forests were a major source of income to the princely states. They developed ‘scientific forestry’ as an attempt to rationalise the revenue: new measurements were developed, trees were categorised into different size categories and their rates of growth were charted, so that the output of the forest could be projected into the future. But everything else that made up an actual living forest had vanished from these projections, all the other species, all the other activities—as Scott says, they literally couldn’t see the forest for the trees. Then, in the next phase, they began planting ‘production forests’, monocultures with trees all the same age, lined up in rows. And of course, with our ecological perspective, we know where this is heading: as the soil built up by the old growth forest becomes exhausted, the trees in the new rationalised forests no longer grow at the rates projected, the forest managers get caught up in needing fertilisers and pesticides and fungicides, trying to reintroduce species that had been driven out, struggling to reproduce something like the living forest that their way of seeing had destroyed.

    DH: And at the root of this, there’s a ‘problem’ that was only there from the perspective of the office at the centre of a huge area of territory that wants to be able to ‘know’ what is going on everywhere and then improve the numbers in the model that has come to stand for the forest. There was no ‘problem’ from the point of view of the old-growth forest, or the people who were actually living and working there.

    CB: Scott uses the concept of legibility to explain a number of seemingly disparate phenomena. Things like surnames, which only arrived in some parts of Europe as late as the Napoleonic period—they give the state a way of knowing who is who, how many people there are in a population, so that they can be taxed or conscripted effectively. Standardised weights and measures—the metric system was invented in France at the end of the 18thcentury and then gradually imposed upon the whole of Europe, replacing measures that varied from one market town to the next. The introduction of passports is another example. And you see this desire for legibility, too, within companies. The whole concept of Taylorisation and time-and-motion studies is another form of increasing the ability to read activity from above. 

    Now, one of the origins of computing is in the construction of machines to do some of this work. It took seven years to process all the data that had been collected in the 1880 census in the United States. Between 1880 and 1890, the population was growing so fast that, not only was the data from the last census out of date, it was reckoned that it would take 13 years to process the data from the next census. But right on time, you get the Hollerith machine, a punchcard database system that allows all the data to be processed within six weeks.

    That was a huge improvement from the point of view of the state’s ability to understand what’s going on—and it fits right into the story that we’ve been talking about of the intellectual origins of computers in the desire to measure, observe, count and categorise. 

    But we mustn’t only view this as negative, it has produced wonders.

    DH: I think this is why I wanted to frame this conversation in terms of ‘the limits to measurement’, rather than ‘the problem with measurement’. Because you’re right, however anarchistic our instincts might be, I don’t know many people who would honestly choose to forego all of what the state provides for them. I remember Vinay Gupta saying, ‘I’ve stopped worrying about the power of the state, I’ve started worrying that the state is going to collapse before we’ve built something to replace it.’

    And I remember the first time I tried to speak about this question of the measurable and the unmeasurable, realising that there were people who heard what I was saying as an argument against measurement. Actually, what I would like to bring into conversation is this: under what circumstances is measurement helpful and appropriate? Under what circumstances does measurement become problematic? And how do we develop a language for talking about these things more subtly?

    And perhaps one way of approaching that subtlety is to bring in an idea from Ivan Illich. In his early books, in the 1970s, he talked a lot about counterproductivity and ‘the threshold of counterproductivity’: the point beyond which increasing the intensity or the amount of a given thing begins to produce the opposite of the effect that it has been producing so far. Beyond a certain point, he argued, our schooling systems end up making us stupider as societies, our health systems end up making us sick, our prison systems end up creating more criminality. Illich brought together a lot of detail to make those arguments, but I think the general principle of the threshold of counterproductivity can be a good tool for thinking with, because it gets us free of thinking in either-or terms, without replacing that with slacker relativism. Instead of debating whether X is a ‘good thing’ or a ‘bad thing’, or claiming that it’s all just a matter of opinion, you can say that, up to a certain point, X tends to be helpful—and beyond that point, it becomes actively unhelpful.

    This doesn’t have to be particularly esoteric. Think about food: we can pretty much all agree that food is a good thing, but once you’ve eaten a certain amount, it’s not just that you get diminishing returns, it’s that you’re going to make yourself ill.

    CB: I think this is an excellent concept. I think there’s a complete lack, though, of applying anything like this to technology and asking at what point one reaches the level of counterproductivity. I’m thinking of the kind of software that is imposed to track accounting in an organisation: where you used to just get a piece of paper and hand in your receipts and somebody would sort it out, you now have to fill in all kinds of forms online, collecting far more information than used to be the case. Now, as far as the accountants are concerned, this is wonderful: they can analyse exactly what’s going on in the system. The trouble is, you’re getting a huge counterproductivity effect because it becomes so complicated to do something. Now, where in the system can one actually make that decision to say, actually, we don’t want to have that type of accounting system, because the effect on the core activity of the organisation is going to be negative? That’s missing.

    DH: Even the possibility of that being a legitimate conversation is missing. But I wonder whether we can look at small, grassroots organisations as spaces within which you don’t have the requirement for the level of measurement and legibility—and, in its absence, certain kinds of human flourishing tend to be more likely to happen than they are in most institutional spaces. Equally, within institutions, you often find pockets within which people seem to be coming alive. If I think of the examples that I’ve experienced, those living corners within larger institutions, what is going on is usually that you have one or two individuals who are smart in a particular way—and they are effectively holding up an umbrella over this human-scale space.

    CB: Hiding it!

    DH: Yes. They are producing the necessary information to feed upwards and outwards into the systems, to keep the systems off people’s backs…

    CB: Strangely, in the business world—where I have half a foot—there’s a whole vast literature about the wonderful energy and passion and creativity that occurs in startups. There’s a slightly smaller literature on what are called ‘skunkworks’, these hidden projects that occur in large organisations that sometimes then emerge as being very important. There are some classic inventions that were invented by somebody working in a big organisation, a little part-time project that they were pursuing out of curiosity, and eventually it becomes their best-seller. Post-It notes is the example that always gets used.

    DH: So what you’re saying is, within the business school world, there’s at least a partial recognition of the need for spaces in which the rules are off people’s backs…?

    CB: But there’s a cognitive dissonance, because then there’s a whole other literature which develops all these systems for tracking and tracing, Taylorizing and managerialising things.

    DH: So, the thing that we’re talking about, when we talk about the kinds of spaces in which people come alive—spaces in which there is room for human flourishing—we’re asserting that one of the characteristics of such a space is that there is less pressure for reality to be reduced to things which can be measured. Things which can’t be measured are allowed to be taken seriously—and, somehow, some individual or group has built an interface to the systems that require measurement, that keeps those systems satisfied, without reducing the activity within the space to activity to satisfy those systems. 

    So, the thing that goes on within those spaces, I think, is very closely related to what Anthony McCann is getting at when he talks about ‘the heart of the commons’. His starting point is Irish traditional music, the field where he started his studies, and he’s talking about what it is that matters to people within the traditional culture and that goes missing from the version of that culture that you find in the archives of the folk song collectors. Those archives are the legible version of the culture, but you won’t find any people there, and you won’t find the thing that matters most, what it feels like to be there. And when Anthony was here a few weeks ago, he was talking about the need to develop language for this thing that matters. And I guess that means developing a sufficient degree of legibility, so that this is not completely invisible, in order to defend it. In order for it not to be crushed. 

    And this is where it gets uneasy, especially when we’re talking about business schools trying to put their finger on this. How do you describe ‘the thing that matters’, how do you word it, is it even possible to do so…

    CB: Without destroying it?

    DH: Yes, exactly. That’s the paradox, isn’t it? What’s the answer?

    CB: Well, if you look at many spiritual traditions, they would say that you can’t word it. And you get this in philosophy, Wittgenstein’s ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’ 

    So what could function in the formal world? Again, I’m thinking back to the business literature, where there’s a contrast in this fascination with top managers. There’s this obsession: what gift do top managers have that makes an organisation really work? And they really talk about it as some kind of magical property. ‘We don’t really know what it is, but if we can find somebody who’s got it then we’re going to pay him a lot of money!’ All kinds of people try and describe it, one way and another, but there is a language there about—whoa, this is something that we can’t really measure, but we know it exists.

    DH: Maybe it would be interesting to start looking for the different examples from different places where we do seem to have some common vocabulary left for talking about things that can’t be reduced to that which is measurable. I say that, because I listen to you and I realise that this is what you’re doing, with your half a foot in the business world—you’re spotting the places within the literature of a rather unlikely field where there is language for talking about this. And I’ve come across a completely other example in the ideas that I’ve been working with around commons and resources. 

    To summarise the problem, first: a resource is something that can be measured, something that is seen in the way that those German princes were looking at a forest. There is a very dominant idea, when people talk about commons—whether they’re talking about the ‘information commons’, the environmental commons, or whatever—that what we’re talking about is a pool of common resources. Again, this is something that Anthony McCann has directed attention towards. We are so used to thinking of things in terms of resources—our organisations have Human Resource departments—but a resource is something to be exploited. And there are very few areas of modern existence where we have a good vocabulary for talking about the idea that some things just shouldn’t be exploited. But one place where we have it is friendship. Because when somebody who you thought of as a friend treats you as a resource, you say, ‘I feel used.’ And everyone knows what you mean. It’s an everyday expression, you don’t have to get into a long explanation of why everything shouldn’t be treated as a resource. We still have that as common knowledge.

    So I’m getting this idea that there might be a project to document, to gather together, the unlikely mixture of pockets where there is still shared vocabulary for talking about the importance of the part that can’t be measured.

    CB: I think that good organisations are aware of this. They are aware of the community that is built within the organisation and the dependence of the organisation on non-contractual relationships, on collaboration, on the ability of people to do favours for each other at a friendship level, even though it’s in a workplace.

    DH: This is what David Graeber calls the ‘everyday communism’ which subsidises the world. The whole world system that we’re in, which might look like this globalised, capitalist, neoliberal system, would grind to a halt without the everyday communism of people doing things for each other without asking, ‘What’s in it for me?’

    CB: So good organisations recognise this. The thing is, because it’s not measured, because it’s not worded, it’s often difficult to defend. It can be very simple things, like cancelling Christmas parties. Good managers know that the best way to get their team to work is to take them out, get them all drunk and next time they meet have the problems will be solved! 

    DH: That sounds like a rather culturally-specific approach to management…

    CB: There are certainly variations on the theme! But the basic concept applies. And that’s really creating a space for illegible activity, illegible conversations, which then can break down barriers, can break down categories and solve problems. But that needs to be defended, because it’s very easy for the Christmas party or the social space to be the first luxury that gets cut.

    Where these things work, it’s very often, as you say, those particular people who create an umbrella, who create a protected space. So perhaps there is an opportunity there to try and teach people who are in positions of leadership that there is a particular aspect which has to do with creating these special spaces. Developing a language for that can make them work much better as organisations.

    DH: There is a difficulty here—and I suppose one way into talking about it might be through a lovely story that I came across. I met a guy who had been the managing director of a company with about 200 people working for him. The company was taken over and the nature of the takeover was such that this company was going to be wound down, none of these people were going to work for the new company, but everyone continues to be employed for the next year until the process is complete, with relatively little to do. And he thought, what are we going to do, for the next year? And, in particular, so that these people are in the best position possible to go off and find new work or do whatever it is they do next. And he decided that they would just get out on the table everything that people were interested in, the things that they did, the things that they had never told anybody at work about, that were really important to them in their lives—and just get everyone’s skills and talents and ideas out there, and see what would happen as they started matching things up together. And he said it was the most amazing year of his career—and I could see it, in the way he talked about it.

    So, here’s the problem: things can become amazing when we can bring more of ourselves into the workplace, the school, whatever space it is that we spend most of our waking hours. But… the shadow side of this is that, you’ve talked about Taylorist management and we think of Henry Ford and the production line, that whole model of 20thcentury capitalism, but there is this whole other thing of the post-Fordist, post-industrial economy, where we are absolutely expected to bring more of ourselves to work, because it’s not just our bodies but our emotions that our employers want to use as resources.

    Once upon a time, I used to work as a corporate spy. Well, really I was a struggling freelance radio journalist, taking bits and pieces of other work to pay the bills, and every few weeks I used to get paid to go and sit in Starbucks, drink a coffee, make various observations, then buy a takeout coffee and run round the corner to weigh it and take its temperature, and fill out a twelve-page form that went back to Starbucks headquarters to tell them how their staff in this local branch were doing. The bit that sticks in my mind was that, not only did I have to stand in the Starbucks queue with a stopwatch in my pocket, timing the process and remembering whether the staff were following the different stages of the script—I also had to report whether, over and above the script, I had observed staff recognising and acknowledging regular customers and initiating spontaneous conversations. So Starbucks was essentially trying to write the computer program for how you simulate, systematically, the friendly local cafe, only with precariously employed staff who have no real connection to the place they are working and are at the mercy of this mystery shopper who is sent once a month to check up on them.

    At the same time, I was living around the corner from an independent cafe run by a couple of old hippies who were seriously grumpy. You went in there for the first time and you’d get a good cup of coffee, but they would be surly with you. If you kept coming back, though, they would begin to acknowledge your existence and you would begin to notice that they had their regulars who got to sit at the table at the back and play chess with them and decide what music went on the stereo and smoke a joint together when it was quiet in the afternoon. 

    And I realised that the one thing that Starbucks couldn’t attempt to simulate was customer unfriendliness—and that there was something about this customer unfriendliness that felt right. If we think in terms of thresholds, again, maybe it’s kind of OK to use money to pay for a good cup of coffee, but if I’m paying for someone to act like they’re my friend, we’ve crossed one of those lines?

    But this is the thing: we want to create spaces in which we can bring more of ourselves to what we do, in which we can be more than just getting through the day, trying to avoid drawing any unwanted attention and trying to satisfy the requirements of the system that we’re plugged into—yes, we want to be doing something more meaningful with our lives, bringing more of ourselves into the situation. But if we try to make legible ‘the stuff that matters’, the stuff that would bring more of ourselves into the situation, how do we do it without it becoming another resource to be harnessed, allowing the extension of exploitation even further?

    CB: I don’t know. I think that’s a real danger and I think, equally, in creating the vocabulary that we might develop, we are in danger of formalising it. And even if our terms are very vague and abstract, somebody will say, ‘Ah, here I have a collection of categories and I will construct a form or an application that will then be used to describe that.’ Just like your Starbucks example: is the barrista behaving like he is happy?

    DH: Yes, they create the model and then they try to run the model in a way that is as convincing a simulation as possible, whilst extracting as much…

    CB: The aspect of this creation of models that we haven’t really addressed, but is intimately related here, is that we create the models and then we believe the models and don’t believe reality. We see this everywhere around us. The classic phrase is ‘All models are wrong, but some models are useful.’ Models don’t represent reality perfectly: a perfect representation of reality would be a cloned copy. Necessarily, they are abstraction and simplification, in order to be useful. The trouble is, we create a model, typically today on a computer screen, and then what we see in front of us on the screen becomes ‘reality’. 

    My favourite example is a parcel I sent in Britain by Special Delivery, guaranteed to arrive the next day. It didn’t arrive. I rang the Post Office the following day and said, ‘My parcel didn’t arrive.’ The Post Office employee said, ‘Yes it did, it says so on my computer.’ And at that moment, the friend to whom I had sent it rang me on my mobile and said, ‘The postman is just coming and giving me your parcel now!’ I told this to the Post Office employee on the other line and she said, ‘No, that’s not possible, it was delivered yesterday.’

    DH: So that’s the most absurd version of believing the model, rather than the evidence of our experience. But your point is that this is a pattern.

    CB: It’s systematic and it’s very dangerous, because you get a completely warped view of reality, very often. Reality changes, human beings change, and if your model doesn’t change appropriately, you fall into all kinds of pits. Governments collect the wrong data, or miss some major social change that is completely outside their perception at every level. Equally, in organisations, you have this problem. So, as part of the development of this language that we’re talking about, we also need to develop a language for making people aware of the limitations of the model. Making people aware that the model is useful within these limits, but there may be more, and to have a look outside the window occasionally to see what else there is.

    DH: So, this brings us back to the idea of treating the vagueness and imprecision of language as a feature rather than a bug. As not a problem that we need to try and get rid of, but actually as something helpful.

    You mentioned Wittgenstein’s line about remaining silent—and the way that different religious traditions have treated the thing that matters most as incapable of being put into words. But religions haven’t exactly remained silent! One thing that does go on within religious language is the deliberate multiplication of language to keep in mind its inadequacy. So you have the hundred names of God, because one way of speaking about the unspeakable is by never forgetting that none of the language that you use is adequate to it. And, in some ways, we need a hundred names for everything! This, again, recalls something that Anthony talks about—lifting up the words and looking underneath—and I think that part of the way that you avoid forgetting to do that is by using a multiple vocabulary. Rather than using one word all of the time, at which point that word quickly comes to be treated as if it’s a perfect match. 

    So perhaps that’s one principle that we could try to use?

    CB: It sounds like a very good starting point. The challenge is making that acceptable, socially. There is a long history in the religious traditions that you’re talking about of the difficulty of language and the difficulty of spiritual concepts—and that this is OK. You know, if you look at the Talmudic traditions of interpretation, it is OK to struggle with concepts, that is a valid task. Whereas the modern tendency is to want to simplify, to take away effort, to take away difficulty all the time. 

    Nearly every Computer Science paper will start off by saying ‘We wish to reduce the effort involved in doing X and here is the method…’ That’s the basic principle by which you do research. We actually need to write new Computer Science papers which start ‘We are now increasing the effort to do X because this will have beneficial effects.’ I have suggested this in the past, under the heading of ‘slow computing’. 

    Based on our discussion during the Västerås Conversations, this text was first published in Dark Mountain: Issue 7.

  • When Promises of Progress Fail Us

    When I hear the word ‘postmodernism’ outside of a seminar room, it is usually spoken with distaste. It has come to signify a deliberately impenetrable intellectual jargon, cliquish, fashion-conscious, its fashions suspected of coming straight from the Emperor’s New Wardrobe. For many, its chief characteristic is a radical relativism that leaves no ground for the kind of value judgments that make it possible to act for change.

    Whether or not this is fair to the thinkers most closely associated with the term, it is certainly unfortunate for Gustavo Esteva and Madhu Suri Prakash’s recently reissued book Grassroots Postmodernism, first published in the late 1990s. For this is a book that will bemuse those expecting a contribution to the esoteric discourses of the seminar room, yet one that may prove more satisfying to those whom the title might put off.

    The idea that we are living ‘after modernity’ reflects a sense that the future has failed. The origins of academic postmodernism lie in the retreat into the university of activists and thinkers whose hopes for revolution had been disappointed in the events of 1968. Since then, a more general disillusionment has spread through the Western world, beginning in the crises of the 1970s, muddied by the neoliberal boom years, then given new clarity by the systemic crisis that broke out in the autumn of 2008. Opinion polls confirm that the basic assumption of economic progress – that each generation will grow up more prosperous and with greater opportunities than their parents – no longer rings true for most of us. The failure of the promises of modernity is no longer a theoretical matter, but part of the everyday experience of people in Western societies.

    Despite its radical roots, the postmodernism of the seminar room has little to offer to people trying to make sense of their lives in the absence of progress. But another set of voices may be more helpful: the voices of those of the same generation who retreated not to the universities, but to the mountains, the villages and the slums, where their thinking was challenged and deepened by encounters with the stubborn refusal of peasants and Indigenous people to be confined to history. This is the source of the other postmodernism, which Esteva and Prakash seek to articulate, whose echoes can also be caught in the words of John Berger, Subcomandante Marcos, or Vandana Shiva – who has written the introduction to this new edition.

    In both Grassroots Postmodernism and The Future of Development – Esteva’s most recent collaboration – the failure of modernity is exemplified by the failure of the promise of international development, as experienced in countries such as Mexico and India. The unravelling of this promise leads to the questioning of a number of concepts previously held to be beyond criticism. These include the fantasy of ‘thinking globally’, which always in practice means attempting to extend a way of seeing the world with roots in a particular time and place into a framework into which other cultures are required to contort themselves. In the case of international development, the most problematic aspect of this framework is the idea of the atomised individual, possessed of a set of rights. The question of how we can challenge injustice within our own and each other’s cultures without appealing to this kind of individualism is one of the major discussions in Grassroots Postmodernism, while The Future of Development offers advice for those who want to know how to put their idealism into practice.

    Both of these books belong to a larger set of conversations particularly associated with the friends and collaborators of Ivan Illich, and they represent an ongoing improvisation around themes that are recognisable from Illich’s own work. Of particular value is the contribution of Salvatore Babones to The Future of Development, drawing on his background in quantitative social policy to provide a forensic analysis of development statistics.

    The greatest strength of both books is that they avoid the academic trap of treating critique as an end in itself. Rather, they are the work of people engaged at the grassroots, for whom thought and action are inseparable. They deserve to be read widely within the international development sector, but they also contain important clues to finding our own ways beyond the dead ends of modernity in the troubled societies of the post-industrial West.

    Published in Resurgence: Issue 289.

  • Excavating Buried Assumptions

    Excavating Buried Assumptions

    A review of Beyond Economics and Ecology: The Radical Thought of Ivan Illich.

    Order a second-hand copy of one of Ivan Illich’s books over the internet, and it will more than likely come with the insignia of a university library and a stamp confirming that it has been ‘Withdrawn’. This says something about the trajectory followed until recently by the reputation of this deeply radical thinker – but the publication of a new collection of four of his most insightful essays suggests that the rediscovery of Illich is gathering momentum.

    For a time in the 1970s, Illich was a kind of intellectual celebrity, brilliant and controversial. At the centre of his work was the idea of “the threshold of counterproductivity”: the point beyond which more schooling starts to make us stupider and more health care makes us sick. He dedicated himself to revealing the idiocies of industrial society. He once calculated that, when all the hours worked to pay the direct and indirect costs of cars and roads were taken into account, the average speed of automotive transport was less than 5mph.

    What is harder to imagine now is the reach that these ideas had. The essay in which he made that calculation – an extended version of which appears in this collection as Energy and Equity – was first published on the front page of Le Monde. The New York Times dedicated an extensive article to the details of his falling out with the Vatican. (Illich had started out as a Catholic priest, though his critique of institutions included a call for the church to get rid of professional clergy, and the fierceness with which he criticised more modern institutions grew out of his sense that they were repeating the mistakes of institutionalised Christianity in secular form.) He hated the loudspeaker, calling it the most anti-democratic technology humanity had invented, but when he gave public lectures in those years, his voice would often have to be relayed to audiences that spilled over into neighbouring lecture halls.

    Around the start of the 1980s, he slipped from view. History had turned a corner: many of the possibilities for a saner reaction to resource scarcity, environmental and economic crisis that had been glimpsed during the previous decade were now lost in the dustcloud of the neoliberal juggernaut. From a status in which no university library would be without his books, Illich reached the point where they could be safely discarded.

    Yet, as Sajay Samuel argues in the introduction to this new collection, Illich’s voice speaks now more clearly than ever. When the contradiction of ‘sustainable development’ was launched upon the world later in the 1980s, Illich immediately saw through it. He warned, too, of the danger of treating the environmental crisis in isolation, rather than recognising its roots in the deep cultural contradictions of our economic order and the worldview that underpins it. In the company of an extraordinary collection of friends and collaborators, he sought to excavate the buried assumptions on which modern societies have been founded and to show us how strange those assumptions would have looked to most of the people who have ever lived. “All through history,” he points out, “the best measure for bad times was the percentage of food eaten that had to be purchased.”

    Sometimes the insight is contained in a single sentence, sometimes we are led to it over pages, through the back alleys of history, but the reader will encounter many of them in these pages. And even now, perhaps there are university librarians placing orders for Beyond Economics and Ecology as a first step towards rebuilding that gap on their shelves.

    First published in Resurgence: Issue 286.

  • The Capacity for Second Thoughts: Ivan Illich

    A review of Beyond Economics & Ecology: The Radical Thought of Ivan Illich.

    I want to cultivate the capacity for second thoughts, by which I mean the stance and the competence that makes it feasible to enquire into the obvious. This is what I call learning.

    ‘Ascesis’, 1989

    Those words could stand for the desire which underlies the work of Ivan Illich and the effect his writing can have on the reader. Sometimes the second thoughts are triggered by short, simple statements, capable of detonating what we think we know: ‘All through history, the best measure for bad times was the percentage of food eaten that had to be purchased.’ In other cases, they come when we have the patience to stand alongside him, looking into the mirror of the past, until our eyes adjust and we begin to recognise the strangeness of ideas we have always taken for granted.

    From his rise to prominence in the late 1960s to the last conversations with David Cayley, published as The Rivers North of the Future, Illich sought to uncover the hidden assumptions on which modern industrial societies had been built. He saw this as a revolutionary project, one that went deeper than most formulations of revolution:

    The political revolutionary wants to improve existing institutions—their productivity and the quality and distribution of their products. His vision of what is desirable and possible is based on consumption habits developed during the last hundred years. The cultural revolutionary believes that these habits have radically distorted our view of what human beings can have and want. He questions the reality that others take for granted, a reality that, in his view, is the artificial by-product of contemporary institutions, created and reinforced by them in pursuit of their short-term ends.

    ‘The Need for Cultural Revolution’, 1970

    Ten years after his death, the promises of industrial society are unravelling all around us, yet this does not bring any great confidence in the possibility of change. The project of political revolution belongs to an earlier age, one in which the future still seemed capable of serving as a vessel for people’s hopes and desires, rather than a source of anxiety, something from which we try to distract ourselves. Yet there is an anger and a hunger below the surface of our societies for which nothing short of the language of revolution seems large enough. The reverberations of Russell Brand’s performance on Newsnight are one signal of this.

    In such a context, the four short, powerful essays republished in this new collection deserve to be read widely. A quiet rediscovery of Illich has been underway for some time, whether (as David Bollier has suggested) within the commons movement, through events such as last summer’s After the Crisis conference in Oakland, or in the pages of the Dark Mountain journal. Yet this hardly compares to the level of public attention which their author enjoyed, or endured, in the period in which the earliest of these essays was written.

    ‘Energy and Equity’ first appeared on the front page of Le Monde in early 1973, as the rising prosperity of the post-war decades was giving way to oil shocks and limits to growth. By then, Illich had reached the strange position of an intellectual celebrity. (The closest equivalent today is Zizek.) A Catholic priest who had fallen out with the Vatican, the story of how he outwitted the Inquisition was reported in entertaining detail by the New York Times. His critiques of the sacred institutions of secular society—the education system in Deschooling Society, the healthcare system in Medical Nemesis—were debated in journals and by professional bodies whose members polarised between responses of outrage and recognition.

    The memory of those debates means that his name is often included on lists of radical educators, alongside the likes of Paulo Freire and John Dewey. Yet this is misleading, for he did not write about these institutions to lay out pedagogical principles or advocate for educational reform, but as key examples of a larger phenomenon. He sought to illuminate the underside of economic development, to give us tools for thinking about those aspects which go conveniently unmeasured and those which elude measurement. So he talks about the ‘thresholds of counterproductivity’ beyond which the increased production of goods and services becomes self-defeating—prisons make us criminal, hospitals make us sick and schools deaden our minds—and the realm of ‘shadow work’ which grows in parallel with the industrial production of commodities. However good our intentions, he insists, if we do not pay attention to this underside, we will define the problems we face in terms that lead us to make matters worse. This happens today when economic and ecological crises come to be defined as a lack of jobs and a lack of clean energy.

    Against this, Illich asks us to revisit the histories out of which the industrial world of ‘energy’ and ‘employment’ came into being. Neither of these terms, he argues, names a phenomenon that was simply waiting to be discovered by economists and physicists:

    Most languages have never had one single word to designate all activities that are considered useful … For the last three decades, the Ministry for Language Development in Djakarta tried to impose one term bekerdja in lieu of half a dozen others used to designate productive jobs … But the people continue to refer to what they do with different terms for pleasurable, or degrading, or tiresome, or bureaucratic actions—whether they are paid or not.

    The unifying abstraction of ‘employment’ in its modern economic sense did not arrive as a revelation of a reality that had been there all along, but as an imposition that was massively resisted by ordinary people for generations. Until the Industrial Revolution was well under way, ‘wage work’ was considered a sign of destitution. What changed was that the other means by which people had been able to support themselves were taken away, through the enclosure of commons and the outlawing of subsistence practices. Under these conditions, radical dependence on the money economy became normalised to the point where it is those who do not have employment who are in need of rescuing.

    In drawing attention to such histories, Illich does not pretend that it is desirable or possible to turn back the clock. There is no golden age here, but a refusal to reduce the ways in which people have lived in other times and places to a homogeneously miserable past from which we should simply be glad to have escaped. At which point, we may come to recognise ourselves as seen through the eyes of Miguel, a young Mexican visiting Europe in the 1970s, who writes to Illich of his host:

    Señor Mueller behaves as todo un senor [a true gentleman might be the English equivalent]. But most Germans act like destitute people with too much money. No one can help another. No one can take people in—into his household.

    ‘Destitute people with too much money’: does that not touch precisely on the paradox of the ‘developed’ societies, the strange coexistence of what remains—even in these times of ‘austerity’—an unprecedented consumption of goods and services, with a pervasive atmosphere of insecurity and precariousness? The percentage of food eaten that has had to be purchased can never have been higher.

    Since the rise of the modern environmental movement, critics of industrial society have generally looked to ecology as a source of hope. Yet here, too, Illich asks us to think twice. ‘Energy’ like ‘employment’ is an abstraction by which quite different phenomena are merged together. To define the problems we face primarily in terms of environmental crisis is to mistake the symptom for the disease, to ignore the social and cultural roots of the mess in which we find ourselves. Long before today’s schemes for geo-engineering, he saw the nightmares that experts would propose in the name of saving the planet.

    It is sometimes said that Illich is too negative, offering criticism without practical alternatives. In fact, the influence of his ideas can be traced in practical projects from John McKnight’s Asset-Based Community Development to the work of Gustavo Esteva and friends in Oaxaca and Chiapas. In another sense, though, this objection underestimates the practical value of criticism. As Sajay Samuel writes in the introduction, ‘The task of living differently entails the task of thinking differently.’

    I don’t expect this book will reach as wide an audience as Brand’s YouTube video—though someone should probably send him a copy—but there is something in the approach of this cultural revolutionary that has survived the failure of the future, that continues to be useful in making sense of our situation and tracing the possibilities that remain, when we can no longer put flesh on the resonant words of political revolution.

    First published in STIR: Issue 04.

  • Commoning in the City

    Commoning in the City

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Published as the cover story of STIR: Issue 2.

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

    Dealing With Our Own Shit: A Conversation With Gustavo Esteva

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    DH: The starting point of hope.

    GE: Absolutely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    * * *

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

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

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

    DH: You’re dealing with your own shit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Published in Dark Mountain: Issue 4.

  • Words Which Matter to People

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

    * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Rehoming Society: A Conversation with Sajay Samuel

    Rehoming Society: A Conversation with Sajay Samuel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    DH: So how do we do that?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    DH: So knowledge begins with perception?

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

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

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

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

    DH: A set of variables, a statistical representation.

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

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

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

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

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

    SS: Right!

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

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

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

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

    First published in Dark Mountain: Issue 3.