DOUGALD HINE

Tag: the commons

  • The Commons: An Unfinished History

    A city navigating the transition from the old certainties of heavy industry to the promises of a post-industrial future. Out in the fjord, we passed a tanker with SHALE GAS FOR PROGRESS emblazoned on its side. The venue was a shiny new arts centre, the event a seminar to mark the opening of the Greenlightdistrict Art Festival. The welcome was warm and following the opening lecture from Ove Jakobsen, professor of ecological economics at Bodø, I had an hour to unfold some of the backstory to the industrial world to which we find ourselves the heirs.

    This was a story about fishermen and hill-farmers, about the history of how people have made a living and made lives for themselves on the edges of a continent or in the hill country where there’s never been much profit to be made. It’s a story about why the history of the commons bears no relation to Garret Hardin’s famous ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ – and how this history is still unfinished.

    Greenlightdistrict Kunstfestival, Porsgrunn, Norway

  • Spelling it Out

    Spelling it Out

    On the desk at which I write there lies a wand. At least, this is how I have thought of it, since the afternoon, five or six years ago, when it came into my hands: thirteen inches of fenland bog oak, turned on a pole lathe, its tip the shape of an acorn.

    I’d slept the night at a friend’s house in Peterborough and, before dropping me at the station, he wanted me to see the Green Backyard. Even in the short time I had to walk around the site and chat over a cup of tea, I got why. There’s a particular magic that encircles certain projects, so strong that you can smell it. I think of the Access Space media lab in Sheffield, or the West Norwood Feast street market in south London, owned and run by the local community.

    By invoking the idea of ‘magic’, I want to point to a quality which these projects share. At their heart is something that is obvious, yet beyond the grasp of the logic of either the private or the public sector, because their existence would be impossible without the active involvement of people who are doing things freely, for their own reasons, rather than because they have been paid or told to do so. A parallel vocabulary has grown up to cover this kind of activity — its initiates speak of ‘the third sector’, ‘civil society’, ‘social capital’ and so on — but my suggestion is that, while it may have its uses, such language misses much of what people experience as distinctive about places such as Access Space or the Green Backyard. (Nor is it quite covered by the older language of ‘volunteering’.)

    I could go further in elaborating this distinctiveness and the way it eludes expression in a formal language — and I would do so by locating this kind of activity within the logic of the commons, as distinguished from the entwined logic of public and private. As Ivan Illich writes of the customary agreements which governed the historical commons of England, ‘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.’ This complexity did not present a problem for those involved in commoning — and, as Elinor Ostrom demonstrates conclusively, Garrett Hardin’s much-cited assertion that commoning ends inexorably in tragedy was a crude libel. Rather, it is to those who would govern, manage or exploit from above that the ‘illegibility’ of the commons appears as a problem. In any attempt to simplify the complex human fabric of a commons into a written framework, what Anthony McCann calls ‘the heart of the commons’ is likely to go missing.

    This line of argument may go some way to explain the difficulties that ensue when those responsible for such projects find themselves having to deal with systems and institutions whose reality consists of that which can be written down, measured, counted and priced. Yet, in spelling this out, there is a danger that it comes to read as an argument against any attempt at collaboration with the public or private actors with which such projects often find themselves having to coexist, and this too would be a simplification. Instead, in the notes that follow, I want to share a way of thinking about the trickiness of language that has grown out of my own experience of helping to bring such projects to life.

    So I take the wand, or whatever it is, and draw a shape in the dust. This is not an authoritative model, only the kind of map that one friend might draw for another on the back of a napkin, trying to pin down an experience that is just starting to make sense.

    I have been carrying this model around for a couple of years. It came out of conversations with a friend with whom Anna Björkman and I were beginning a collaboration here in Sweden, and out of Anna’s experiences working with grassroots women’s organisations in Israel and Palestine. We needed a way to make sense of the shifting terms in which we found ourselves talking about the same project. It gave us a shared reference point to make sense of which language was appropriate to which context, how and when to move between them.

    It also offers a way of mapping a set of problems that you may have encountered in your own work or in the work of people and organisations with whom you have had dealings.

    For example, you might recognise the kind of project which has an Upward language but no Inward language, which appears to have been constructed entirely for the purposes of accessing funding and resources, with no underlying life to it. Whole organisations seem to exist to create such projects, serving little other purpose.

    Another situation is the project which has an Inward language but no Outward language. Most likely, this means that the project is not yet realised.

    The poet W.B. Yeats — no stranger to magic — once wrote, ‘In dreams begins responsibility’, and this can serve as a motto for the process by which an idea comes to life. At the start, there is a spark: a moment when you see each other’s eyes light up and the conversation quickens, or you catch sight of an opening and turn towards it. A long and indirect journey lies between this and the time when the idea has become something ‘out there’, something you can point to, something people can tell each other about — by which time, the fluidity of dreams has given way to the heaviness of responsibilities, paying bills and filing accounts.

    Often, you are some way on in this journey before the project has anything resembling an Outward language, and the words you use to explain it to outsiders may change many times before they settle into shape. The lack of a satisfying Outward language is not a problem to a project that is still making its way into being, though it may cause problems for those involved, if they are asked to explain why they are devoting their time and energy to it.

    However, in the absence of an Outward language, be cautious about attempting to explain a project that exists mostly in your dreams and schemes to a neutral audience. The Inward language is like a set of in-jokes: to those involved, it is a web of meaningful connections, but to the uninitiated it is just boring. In the worst case, this hardens into the phenomenon of those ancient mariners who haunt certain kinds of conference, keen to talk you through a PowerPoint deck the length of a Victorian novel which explains their model of the world and how it could be bettered. I don’t doubt that at the root of each such model lies a powerful experience of insight, but I would rather eat your cake before I decide whether I am interested in the recipe, and if you keep trying to feed me recipe after recipe, I may begin to wonder if you actually know your way around an oven.

    To get far enough inside another person’s model of the world that you can feel for yourself what it makes possible is a considerable undertaking. Around the projects with which I have been closely involved lies an improvised scaffolding of ideas — chunks of Keith Johnstone’s improvisation theory, Brian Eno’s notion of ‘scenius’, a back of an envelope version of John McKnight’s Asset-Based Community Development, swathes of the work of Ivan Illich, odd lines scavenged from poets, conversations that Anna and I have around the breakfast table — and in any particular project, these will be bound up with the thoughts and experiences of others with whom I am working. If you really want to know about this stuff, as we get to know each other, I’ll map out corners of it with you, rather as I am trying to map out one particular corner in this text. But the projects themselves must stand or fall without the scaffolding, or nothing has been built.

    One last case, before we sweep away the dust and the triangle with it.

    From time to time, I come across a project which has made the journey to the everyday world of responsibilities without losing sight of the dreams in which it began, which has a lively Outward language and shows signs of an Inward language — not densely scaffolded with footnotes, necessarily, but rich in meaning — and which has reached a point where increased contact with larger institutions and structures is necessary, often because its success makes it no longer possible to operate below the radar.

    If such contact is not to end badly, an Upward language is required, and guides are found to help navigate these colder and unfamiliar waters. These guides offer a formal terminology in which to describe the activities of the project, words which carry authority and which offer a legibility that may also contribute to the development of the Inward language, especially if this has tended to rely on the implicit, on things that are understood without even being put into words.

    The caution here is twofold. First, the authority of such words should not be treated with too much respect. The knowledge and understanding which those involved in the project already have is what brought the project to life — and while there are expert languages which are good at naming and describing the processes by which things come alive, these languages tend to be sterile in themselves. Make use of them, where they help, but do not treat them as seriously as they seem to want to be treated.

    Secondly, guard against the intrusion of the Upward language into the Outward. If it helps with funding applications to deploy words like ‘sustainability’, ‘innovation’, ‘learning platform’, ‘resilience’, ‘impact’ or whatever this year’s keywords are for the structures with which you need to interface, then by all means use them. Just don’t use them when you speak with or write for other human beings.

    It is here that Jessie Brennan’s work with the Green Backyard can offer an example. Art has its own tangle of languages, of course, but here the artist takes on the role of the listener, making time to go beyond the first answers that people might give to a survey or a journalistic vox pop, getting closer to the heart of why a project matters to the people who come into contact with it, then drawing out the words that sing to her and giving them voice in new forms. Not every project has the benefit of such a resident, but every project that has come alive has stories and voices like this, and will reward the patience of someone who takes on the role of the listener. This is where you find an Outer language, by listening to the way that people tell each other about what you are doing, looking for the words that seem to travel.

    What I remember from that brief visit to the Green Backyard is the web of lives and skills woven together into the project: the farmer who was persuaded to bring his tractor down to plough up part of the site; the offenders coming to work here as part of a community service order, some of whom went on coming back after their sentence was over; the graffiti kids painting boards around the site. The work of weaving together such unexpected combinations into a human fabric is a kind of gentle magic — and it is at its most powerful when grounded in place, as at that patch of former allotments in Peterborough, or the shipyard in Govan that is home to the Galgael Trust, or the acre of ancient ground in the Cheshire countryside where Griselda Garner and others weave together the Blackden Trust.

    Such projects do not play on a level field, but on fields that were enclosed generations ago and that are still being enclosed today by those who, like Garrett Hardin, want to insist that only privatisation can secure their future and that the public good is served by the maximisation of the kinds of value that can be reduced to a figure in a spreadsheet. Heartbreaking decisions often get made as a result, and even what looks like success can bring a danger of hollowing out. The land enclosures that climaxed in the 18th century were carried out in the name of ‘improvement’; today, the word would be ‘development’, but the dynamics are much the same. Yet if the value of the commons remains always partly mysterious to systems which can only deal with the legible, so too does their capacity for endurance and the strength which they give to those who live and work with them, and the process of enclosure is never quite as total as its promoters would like us to believe.

    First published in Re:Development: Voices, Cyanotypes & Writings from the Green Backyard by Jessie Brennan (Silent Grid, 2016).

  • 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.

  • A Five Hundred Year Moment?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Bibliographical Note

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

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

    First published in MOORIA magazine.

  • The Crossing of Two Lines

    The Crossing of Two Lines

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

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

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

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

    * * *

    ‘So when did Robert convert?’

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

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

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

    * * *

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

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

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

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

    * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

    * * *

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

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

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

    * * *

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

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

  • Commoning in the City

    Commoning in the City

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Published as the cover story of STIR: Issue 2.

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

    Dealing With Our Own Shit: A Conversation With Gustavo Esteva

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    DH: The starting point of hope.

    GE: Absolutely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    * * *

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

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

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

    DH: You’re dealing with your own shit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Published in Dark Mountain: Issue 4.

  • The Space Hackers Are Coming

    The Space Hackers Are Coming

    In industrial societies, life has been organised into compartments.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    First published in The Future We Deserve (PediaPress)