I’ve been a guest on a number of podcasts over the past year, but this was a particularly enjoyable experience: sitting under the trees in a nearby park, telling stories about what gets left out of the big story of progress and what’s left when that big story fails us. Thanks to Ingrid Rieser for inviting me into the Forest of Thought.
Tag: the future
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The Vital Compass: A Conversation With Vanessa Andreotti
The second time I meet Vanessa Andreotti, we’re in the lobby of a Paris hotel. There are signs warning guests against trying to get around by taxi. It’s Saturday, 1st December, 2018 – or Act III, according to the calendar of the gilets jaunes protesters who are converging on the capital for the third weekend in a row, bringing half the city to a halt.
We’re here for the Plurality University, a gathering of designers and thinkers and sci-fi writers brought together ‘to broaden the scope of thinkable futures’. There are distant sirens and smoke rising from the city below, and it feels like the future already arrived while we were busy looking the other way. So Vanessa and I slip away through the back streets, talking about what happens when the future fails. She’s just been back to Brazil, her home country, and she traces the lines that run from an eruption of anger that spilled out onto the streets there five years earlier to the election of Jair Bolsonaro. How much of today’s politics, around the world, is shaped by the dawning recognition that the ship of modernity – sailing under the flags of development and progress – is going down?
‘A lot depends,’ she says, ‘on whether people feel that the promises were broken, or whether they see that these were false promises all along.’
The first step is an admission that something has gone badly wrong. This is the advantage that Trump had over Clinton, or the Brexiteers over the Remainers: whatever pile of lies they served it up with, they were able to admit that the ship is in trouble, while their opponents went on insisting that we were sailing towards the promised destination. In Brazil, the promise was that everyone could have the lifestyle of a new global middle class – and when this future failed to materialise, Bolsonaro was able to ride the anger of voters by claiming that it could have been theirs, if it hadn’t been for the corruption of his opponents. If the promises were broken, then we look for who to blame and how to take revenge. A lot depends, then, on the recognition that the promises could never have been kept; that they were not only unrealistic, but harmful. For only with this recognition is there a chance of working out what remains, what might be done, starting from the wreckage in which we find ourselves.
For more than ten years, I have been seeking out conversations about what remains, looking for people with whom to think about the wrecked promises of modernity, ways of naming our situation and making it possible to talk together about it. The most illuminating of these encounters have been with people whose thinking was formed by finding themselves and their communities on the hard end of the processes of modernisation. As Gustavo Esteva and I discussed in Dark Mountain: Issue 4, there is a sense that the West is belatedly coming to know the shadows of development and progress, shadows all-too-familiar to those unto whom development was done.
Vanessa Andreotti’s work deals with these shadows. Her institutional position at the University of British Columbia overlaps with her work as part of Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures, a collaboration between academics, artists and indigenous scholars and communities. Six months on from that day in Paris, we record a conversation, and as I listen back to the recording, I’m struck by the sense that she is always speaking out of a collective, collaborative, ongoing process of thinking together. Every time we talk, there are new versions of the ‘social cartographies’, poetic maps that make it possible to have difficult conversations. The maps that emerge from Vanessa’s collaborations are boundary objects, places where we meet, where there is a chance of sitting with our discomfort, with our limits, maybe beginning to find a place within a world that is larger and stranger than that allowed for in the ways of seeing that shaped the modern world.
DH — Looking back at the Dark Mountain Manifesto, there’s a passage towards the end where we talk about ‘redrawing the maps’, a theme I’ve found myself returning to regularly over the past decade. The drawing of maps is full of colonial echoes, so we talk about seeking the kind of maps that are ‘sketched in the dust with a stick, washed away by the next rain’. It’s this image of maps that are explicitly provisional and not pretending to the objective, detached, view-from-above quality that mapping often implies.
That makes me think of what you call a ‘social cartography’ and the collection of maps that you’ve built up with your collaborators. Maybe a good place to start is to ask just what this way of mapping means to you?
VA — You mentioned the colonial approaches to knowledge production, and I think we started there, with an intention to interrupt this totalising relationship with knowledge. In the work of the collective, we felt that maps – as images that could visibilise or invisibilise certain things – had the potential not to represent reality but to create metaphors. We wanted to create spaces for difficult conversations where relationships didn’t fall apart – and the cartographies have been our main tool for working through the difficulties, the hotspots, the tensions, the paradoxes and the contradictions of these conversations.
So, for example, we have the cartography of ‘the house modernity built’ which is talking about the fundamental structure of modernity. There are two carrying walls and there is a roof that is structurally damaged, which is why the house is unstable, facing imminent collapse.
We talk about the foundation of the house being the assumption of separability between humans and what we call ‘nature’. That separation then generates other types of separation, creating hierarchies between humans, and between humans and other species, and this is our understanding of the foundation of colonialism. In the collective, we don’t see colonialism as just the expansion of territory or the subjugation of people; we believe it starts with this foundational separability that interrupts the sense of entanglement of everything, that interrupts the sense that we are part of a metabolism that is the planet and that we belong to a much wider temporality within this metabolism. This separation takes away the intrinsic value of life within a wider whole and creates a situation where we are forced to participate in specific economies within modernity in order to produce value to ‘prove’ that we deserve to be alive.
In the image of the house, one of the carrying walls is the carrying wall of the Enlightenment, or what we refer to as universal reason – this idea of a totalising, universalising form of rationality that wants to reduce being to knowing, that then creates a single story of progress, development and human evolution. The other carrying wall is the carrying wall of the nation state, which is often presented as a benevolent institution, but was primarily created to protect capital.
The current roof of the house is the roof of financial shareholder capitalism, which is different from industrial capitalism. We talk about the differences between the two in terms of the possibility of tracing investments and of using the state as a means of both redistribution and some form of checks on capital.
DH — The way the state used to act as a stabilising force within the system?
VA — Yes, so now we have a speculative financial system where those checks and balances are eroded and where investment is at the expense of others. This investment in destruction is so normalised that even people fighting against climate change or for social justice end up not realising that by using a credit card – or by thinking about the continuity of, for example, our own pensions – we are participating in an economy that is primarily grounded on anonymity and destruction. So there is no way anybody participating in this economy can be innocent, whereas with industrial capitalism, it was much easier to trace the responsibilities: Ford as a manufacturer was embodied in Henry Ford, a person, where it was possible to say, ‘You have responsibilities in relation to society, in relation to your employees’. Today, Ford is a shareholder company and I don’t know if my pension contributions are already invested there, giving me a shareholder interest.
I’m trying to make it simple enough, without losing the complexity of the connections between these things – because I think what these cartographies do is to connect dots in a way that works against our unconscious desires to not talk about the ways we are complicit in harm.
DH — You said that a map like this is not claiming to represent reality, it’s offering a metaphor – and that reminded me of a thought about language that I found really helpful in one of your texts. It’s a two-fold distinction about what’s going on when we use language: one of which is an assumption that an objective description is being made, and the other is that language is always an action within the world, rather than a description of the world from above.
VA — In this sense language mobilises realities. So instead of trying to index reality and meaning with a view to this totalising knowledge that can control reality and engineer something, what we do is see language as an entity that plays with us and we play with it. So the relationship with language becomes very different – and that’s why also, with the maps, they move and they do what they need to do and they need to change, because they are affectable by the world and by how people interact with them.
We see that some of the maps are more stable than others because they are useful for more contexts, up to a point, but they can’t become canonical answers to universal problems. The keeping of the artificiality is really important, I think, because then it draws the attention to the process. It makes it an ongoing movement rather than an accurate description.
DH — So going back to the cartography of the house – and the impossibility of not being tangled up with the systems that are perpetrating the destruction – that’s clearly part of what you’re trying to render visible, which makes for more difficult conversations than the ones that people often want to have. I feel like one of the reasons people shy away from those conversations is because they don’t know what to do if they let all this stuff in. It’s like a pit of despair opening before them – and so it’s easier to go off and have a conversation over here, where we’ve got some simplified version of the future and of how the world is, that allows us to talk as if we had a chance of setting things right.
Letting go of that is both vertiginously frightening for people – it’s like looking off a cliff – and it’s also highly moralised. The terrible thing that Paul and I were accused of in the early days of Dark Mountain was ‘giving up’, and that’s about giving up on the stories of progress, giving up the teleological sense of direction and the possibility of mastery. So I’m interested in your experiences of what happens as we create and hold spaces of conversation beyond reform, beyond revolution, beyond any kind of promise of the direction of history.
VA — I think the giving up of illusions and seeing disillusionment as a generative thing, this is what we’ve been looking at. As you said, modernity is falling and we need to create spaces for things to fall apart generatively. Partly these are the connections that need to be made through the cartographies. Partly it’s about supporting people to work through denial. In this sense, we have been talking about three denials.
The first is the denial of violence: this house, this system that rewards us and gives us enjoyment and security, was created through violence and it is maintained by violence. So there’s an illusion of innocence and a denial of systemic violence that needs to go. Then there’s an illusion about linear progress and the possibility of continuity, this is the denial of the limits of the planet. The third denial is the denial of entanglement. We are not separated from the metabolism that is the planet, but there’s an illusion of separation – from land, from other beings, from each other, and even within ourselves, from the complexities of our own being. Once you start connecting these three illusions together, there is a falling apart. There’s also a sense that if you can’t do anything that leads to something in a teleological way, you’re not doing anything.
This structure of modernity has created a feedback loop that starts with fears: a fear of chaos, a fear of loss, a fear of death, a fear of pain, a fear of pointlessness, worthlessness and meaninglessness that then become allocated desires for specific things. So for example, the fear of scarcity becomes a desire for accumulation. And then these desires, within the modern structures and feedback loops, become entitlements: the desire for accumulation becomes, in turn, a perceived entitlement to property or ownership.
There are several of these feedback loops that make it very difficult for us to imagine anything otherwise or feel secure in embarking on things that could emerge, but that are unfamiliar and that don’t feed the feedback loops. At this point, we talk about the grammar of modernity, what makes things legible within modernity. Because of the reduction of being to knowing, legibility and the idea that reality can be indexed is what provides security. So from there we ask: what is the grammar that makes things legible and thus the only things that become real and ideal? If you want to put the world in a box, what is the size of this box and is it a square box? How does the world need to be, in order to be contained in this box? So we talk about illegibilities: things that are viable, but unimaginable, unthinkable within this grammar.
DH — Possibilities that can’t be seen through these lenses.
VA — Yes – and because we’re working with indigenous knowledge systems, or systems of being, we talk about the problems of trying to graft these systems into the same boxes we are used to. In that sense, we talk about what’s invisibilised. And there’s a need for not trying to make this visible. You need to make what’s invisible visibly absent first; otherwise, what you’re doing is just a translation into the grammar that you already have. We talk about exiled capacities, which are neurobiological states that may offer different kinds of security or stability, even without having a formalised notion of security. These could help us be together without the need to mediate our relationships in articulated knowledge. Through modernity, we relate to each other through knowledge filters, which makes sense to its grammar – but there are other possibilities for relationship, where these knowledge filters are not as important or as thick as we have been socialised into wanting.
If we are not well in our relationship first with where we are – not just in geographical terms, but in a broader sense – there’s no chance we’re going to be able to have healthy one-on-one relationships. We need to be there and then through the unknowability – because there is not a knowing place, it’s a being place – through the unknowability of this being there is where you can connect with other people. So first, you relate through a vital compass, a compass of vitality. Then you have a more intellectual compass that works with it, but is not more important.
DH — That image of a compass of vitality, it makes me think of Ivan Illich talking about conviviality and placing that emphasis on certain ways of being together, coming alive together.
VA — That’s definitely part of it, but this vitality is not just human. It’s through the perception of vitality in everything, the unknowable vitality, that we sense our entanglement with the world.
Suely Rolnik also talks about the vital compass, about how we are being fertilised by the world in unmediated ways, all the time; some gestations come to term, others do not. She talks about the fact that our vital compass is not being given space or developed, so we are having a lot of abortions of possibilities. This is because we want the moral compass to be the only mediator of reality, and this compass is broken.
DH — Wow, what a powerful set of images.
VA — I know! The abortion of possibilities really struck me… I suppose it’s true because if you are afraid of engaging with the world in an unmediated way, you’re not going to allow most gestations to come to term. You want to have autonomy and control over the life that you perceive to be only yours.
DH — There’s a conversation I’ve had with various people about steering by a sense of what you come alive to – and learning to trust, to pay attention to this subtle sense of vitality. If something is dying a little, notice that, and don’t allow anything to be so important that it overrides that awareness and the message it is bringing, the message that something is wrong. To me, this image of the vital compass speaks to that set of conversations and experiences.
VA — Suely Rolnik also has ten propositions to decolonise the unconscious. We have translated them from Portuguese in one of the collective’s publications. There are five in our version – and I think this little death you are talking about is there in those propositions.
DH — That mention of the unconscious brings me to something else I wanted to ask you about. I’ve noticed you talk about your work as a collective in terms of a form of ‘non-Western psychoanalysis’. That struck me as a very curious phrase and I’m interested to hear more about that as a framing of what you’re up to.
VA — Western psychoanalysis draws attention to the unconscious, to the desires and yearnings that drive our decisions and the ways we think. However, the ontology behind it is either anthropocentric or anthropomorphic. It’s all about bodies or archetypes. It’s useful, but it doesn’t really offer any way to manifest entanglement.
The idea, for example, that the land dreams through us is not contemplated by Western psychoanalysis – but it is contemplated by other cultures, including indigenous cultures that use psychotropics, for example, where an encounter with a being in a plant will give you dreams that you wouldn’t have otherwise. These dreams help you work through practical knowledge, knowledge of the psyche and knowledge of the divine, and there are neurological, neurobiological and neurochemical changes too. That is how it becomes neurofunctional.
If these practices are part of your lived reality, you’re talking not just about a chemistry of the brain or its biology, but its functionality: how you start to rely on these dreams, not as a different reality for an escape, but as an extension of the same reality. So we’re coming from learning about practices that do not see the body as the end, the human body – or even the human mythical frame – as the basis of existence…
DH — As the place where the thing that psychoanalytic tradition is dealing with comes to an end, the limit of the reality it can speak of. I see that.
VA — Let’s take the land as a living entity – not as a concept, but as a manifestation, because there’s a difference. A manifestation that is more powerful than just human cognition, but where humans are also part of this manifestation. If we flip that, what possibilities for being and knowing and doing and yearning are opened up? We talk about a metabolic intelligence, we’re thinking about a metabolism not only of the Earth but also of what the Earth is embedded in. In this sense, the land is not a resource or an anthropomorphic extension of ourselves, but we are an extension of the land itself.
If you turn everything to an organic metaphor, we can talk about a metabolism that we’re part of, a metabolism that is sick or that has a big constipation – a lot of shit for us to deal with! Personal shit, collective shit, historical shit, systemic shit. It needs to pass, it needs to be composted, we need to be attentive to it. This shit involves the systemic violence, the complexities of different forms of oppression, the unsustainability of what gives us enjoyment and security, and the illusion of separation. So the denials are probably the cause of the constipation.
We also talk about a ‘bio-internet’ and accessing a new operating system with new ‘apps’ or un-numbing and re-activating capacities that the house has exiled. In that sense, the engagement with indigenous practices is not about coding these practices as an alternative to modernity or as a supplement to modernity. Rather, it relates to (re)learning or (re)creating habits that can help us to figure out if we can interrupt the feedback loops (of fears, desires and perceived entitlements) of the house of modernity in order to open up possibilities that are currently unintelligible and unimaginable.
DH — That thought about the possibility of new possibilities brings me back to a phrase of yours that has stuck with me. You talk about ‘hospicing modernity and assisting with the birth of something new, undefined and potentially, but not necessarily, wiser’. After we first met, I was teaching on the first course at a school called HOME, and those words of yours became a touchstone for that week. Afterwards, a guy who was there wrote an article for VICE and hung his whole piece on those words – except that, firstly, he managed to write you out of the story and just ascribe the words to me, and then he left out the second half, the part about the birth of something new.
What I find striking is that this language of ‘hospicing’ gets used quite a lot in some of the places and conversations that cross paths with Dark Mountain. However, the other half, the assisting with the birth of something new, is often missing in those conversations. Part of that comes, I suspect, from an inability to see much space in between the end of modernity and the end of everything.
I guess that’s what Paul and I were trying to name in the Manifesto, when we wrote that ‘The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world, full stop.’ Then, a couple of years later, in a conversation with David Abram for our second book, I stumbled on a further iteration of that thought: ‘the end of the world as we know it is also the end of a way of knowing the world.’ That feels to me like somewhere you’ve been spending a lot of time, finding language for that.
VA — I think it goes back to the grammar and the feedback loops, too. So there is this desire for certainty, predictability and totalisation, right? You need to know where you’re going, even if it’s extinction! It gives you some security. So how do we open up and interrupt these desires in ways that allow us to take an integrative step into the metabolism, allowing the metabolism itself to show us the way through the vital compass that then recalibrates our intellectual compass.
It’s very interesting that everywhere I speak about hospicing, there’s always a very strong normative desire for humans to create the new reality. It’s this archetype of agency that is extremely ingrained: the idea that we can create something, and then the lack of faith in humanity to create it, which then plays into this sense of resignation. People say ‘Well, I don’t believe we can do it’, and that’s it.
What we are trying to get at is that the death we are talking about is an interruption of the totalisation. If it is about a move of integration, a move towards entanglement, towards the metabolism itself, then it’s the metabolism that does the dreaming and the creation. That’s why we don’t say ‘creating’ something new, we say ‘assisting with the birth’ of something new. We are assistants to it, we are not the ones doing it.
DH — So it’s a humbler role that we might be arriving into, if we’re lucky?
VA — Absolutely. And it’s very different from this bravado thing about saving the Earth or saving humanity or even saving ourselves or our families, prepping for the end of the world. Existentially, it’s a very different starting point. It’s not even about letting go of the ego, it’s shifting existential direction rather than focusing on form: that’s why we don’t use the word ‘transformation’.
We are interested in the shift of direction from the neurobiological wiring of separability that has sustained the house of modernity to the neurofunctional manifestation of a form of responsibility ‘before will’, towards integrative entanglement with everything: ‘the good, the bad and the ugly’. This form of responsibility is driven by the vital compass. It is not an intellectual choice nor is it dependent on convenience, conviction, virtue posturing, martyrdom or sacrifice. You can see this responsibility at work in practices of indigenous and Afro-descendent communities that collaborate with the collective.(1) We have been working on the question of how to invite the interruption of the three denials and the composting of our collective and individual ‘shit’ in non-coercive, experiential ways.(2)
Notes
(1) See bit.do/billcalhoun and bit.do/webofcures
(2) See bit.do/decolonialfuturesimpact
First published in Dark Mountain: Issue 16 – REFUGE, a special edition to mark the tenth anniversary of the Dark Mountain Project.
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From the Dead Centre of the Present
It seems that we were following similar hunches, for years, before we were introduced. The crisis of 2008 had set us on these tracks – or rather, it meant that the tracks we were following anyway seemed suddenly relevant to people who hadn’t noticed them before, so that we found ourselves needing to reformulate, to express what it was we thought we had caught sight of.
In my case, this took the form of Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto, written with Paul Kingsnorth and published in 2009. The hunch that we tried to put into words was that the crisis went deeper than almost anyone wanted to admit, that it went culture deep, that it was a crisis of the stories by which our culture has been living. And if this is true, we thought, then might it not follow that the work of telling stories and making culture becomes central to the task we face, the task of living through dark times and finding possibilities among the ruins.
The tumbling weeks of crisis turn into months, years, and a new normal establishes itself, but it is never the promised return to normal. Eight years on, Dark Mountain has become a gathering point for people trying to work out what still makes sense, in the face of all we know about the depth of the mess the world is in.
A mountain is not exactly an urban thing, though! Sometimes I tell people, it’s not a place you live the whole time: it’s a place you go to look back and get a longer perspective, maybe even to receive some kind of revelation, but you still have an everyday life to return to, back in the city or the village. That’s what I enjoy about this friendship and collaboration with STEALTH – and joy is a word that should be mentioned here, you know! I still remember the night we were first brought together for dinner by a mutual friend and we laughed so much all night we said, we have to do this again tomorrow, and we did. That’s how we got tangled up with each other.
Now, tracing our tangled trajectories across these past eight years – you bouncing between cities, me wandering up and down a mountain of words – I see two stories that we seem to have in common. The first is spatial, the second temporal.
The spatial story concerns a negotiation between the edges and the centre. I need to be careful how I say this, because we have all been told about the way that whatever is edgy, new, avant-garde gets metabolised, made palatable, made marketable and becomes the next iteration of the centre. That’s the story of selling out, or buying in: the great morality tale of counterculture.
The story I’m trying to tell, here – the one I say we have in common – starts with the claim that the centre as we know it is already ruined beyond saving. This is what I see in that image of the burnt-out architecture faculty in Delft in ARCHIPHOENIX. In the manifesto that Paul and I wrote, we speak about this: “None of us knows where to look, but all of us know not to look down. Secretly, we all think we are doomed: even the politicians think this; even the environmentalists…” And then we ask, “What would happen if we looked down?” What if we admit that the centre is already a burnt-out ruin? Might we need to ask ourselves what it is, exactly, that is doomed: what version of ourselves, what set of things (structures, institutions, customs) with which we have identified?
If this is the kind of mess we’re in, then the challenge for those of us at the edges is neither to retain our countercultural purity, nor to negotiate good terms on which to cash in with a centre that is already collapsing – nor even to try to shore that centre up and prevent its collapse (too late!) – but to offer something that could take its place.
“Sometimes you have to go to the edges to get some perspective on the turmoil at the heart of the things,” writes Paul Kingsnorth, my co-founder in Dark Mountain, in late 2016. “Doing so is not an abnegation of public responsibility: it is a form of it. In the old stories, people from the edges of things brought ideas and understandings from the forest back in the kingdom which the kingdom could not generate by itself.”
The arrival at the centre of a figure from the edges is the opening move in many an old story. But the negotiation cannot set anything in motion, so long as the pretence is maintained that business can go on as usual, that a return to normal is on the cards.
So when STEALTH asks how those practices which already showcase possible directions could be “made to work… on a scale that answers the challenges ahead?”, what is in question is not ‘scaling up’ for the sake of profitability, but what might take the place where the centre used to be. How do we find ways of going on making things work when – as in The Report – the all-powerful operating system breaks down. Like Anna Tsing, we are looking for the possibilities of life within capitalist ruins.
“The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world, full stop,” we write, on the last page of the manifesto. The ruins are not the end of the story. Ecologically, the species present (our species included) go on improvising ways of living together, even with all the damage. There are things to be done: salvage work, grief work, the work of remembering and picking up the dropped threads.
This is where we slip from the spatial to the temporal. What is at stake in the temporal story is how we find leverage on the dead centre of the present. Not so long ago, the future served as a point of leverage: a place from which to open up a gap between how things happen to be just now and how they might be. That gap was charged with possibility.
Here I think of the work of Tor Lindstrand, to whom you introduced me in that project in Tensta, ‘Haunted by the Shadows of the Future’. He tells the story of the disappearance of the future in urban planning: the evaporation of any vision or belief in the possibility that things could be different, as the development of cities is subsumed into the operation of the market and marketed with bland identikit images and words. The role of financialisation in this reminds me of William Davies’ description of the consequences of monetary policy under
neoliberalism:The problem with viewing the future as territory to be plundered is that eventually we all have to live there. And if, once there, finding it already plundered, we do the same thing again, we enter a vicious circle. We decline to treat the future as a time when things might be different, with yet to be imagined technologies, institutions and opportunities. The control freaks in finance aren’t content to sit and wait for the future to arrive on its own terms, but intend to profit from it and parcel it out, well before the rest of us have got there.
If the future is already plundered – and if, as Dark Mountain points out, the consequences of related kinds of plundering for the ecological fabric stand in the way of any revival of the confident future of modernity – how else can we open up that gap in which the possibility of change, the non-inevitability of present conditions, can be located?
The great improvisation teacher Keith Johnstone says that, when telling a story, you shouldn’t worry about what’s coming next: you should be like a person walking backwards, looking out for the chance to weave back in one of the threads from earlier in the story. We move through time backwards, like Walter Benjamin’s ‘angel of history’: we cannot go back and fix the mistakes of the past, but at least it is there for us to see, in a way that was never true of the future. Ivan Illich writes of ‘the mirror of the past’: if we look carefully into it, without falling into romanticism and without dismissing it as simply a poorer version of the present, then the past too can serve as a source for a sense of possibility. In a time of endings, one of the forms of possibility it offers is the dropped threads of earlier endings – the way of life which is now falling into ruin was built among the ruins of earlier ways of life.
I see this as central to the method by which you seek to build possible futures, in Bordeaux and Vienna, in Rotterdam and Belgrade, and elsewhere. I remember sitting in a seminar room in Gothenburg as you showed us images of that mutual aid society in the Netherlands in the 1860s, created by workers to build their own homes. A trajectory can be traced from this initiative to the grander state projects for welfare of the mid-20th century, to the hollowing out of those projects under the neoliberal period of marketisation, to the crisis of 2008 in which they are revealed as ruins. Even as you go about improvising practical strategies to bring these ruins to life, you are always looking back to the beginnings of the story and asking what has been lost or written out, in the way that it has been told.
In THE REPORT, you reveal the pattern by which the role of bottom-up initiatives in the building of the city have been written out of Vienna’s story. What emerges from these researches and the future narratives which they inform is the realisation that, in many parts of Europe, the achievements of social democracy were born out of movements which looked far more like anarcho-syndicalism than those who later consolidated these achievements into top-down state systems would be willing to admit.
Those movements were born out of necessity, operating within the ruins of the commons, devastated by the early phases of industrial capitalism; now, after 40 years of neoliberalism, as we look for ways to operate within the ruins of the welfare societies of the 20th century, their histories can help us open the gap between how things are and how they might be.
We meet in the conviction that telling stories is not just a way of passing the time, but the way that we find our bearings in the world. A story opens a space of possibility into which we can invite others and when the work of building new projects among the ruins is at its hardest, when we wonder if it is worth going on, it is by retelling the stories that we connect ourselves to the past and the future, place ourselves within time. The right story, told from the heart, can be the difference between going on and giving up.
First published in Upscaling, Training, Commoning (Jovis, 2018), a book by the Dutch-Serbian architecture duo STEALTH.unlimited.
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Remember the Future?
Published in Dark Mountain: Issue 2.
I am retracing my steps, trying to work out where I last saw it.
In the north of Moscow, there is a park called VDNKh. It was built in the1930s, under Stalin, and then rebuilt in the 1950s as an Exhibition of the Achievements of the National Economy. An enormous site, full of gilded statues, fountains and pavilions dedicated to different industries and domains of Soviet cultural prowess.
I don’t know in what year the exhibitions within those pavilions were last updated, but if you visit the Space pavilion, you will find a display on a dusty wall towards the back. It climbs from floor to ceiling, measuring decade by decade the achievements of the Soviet space programme. You start in the 1950s with Sputnik, then images of the Soyuz rockets, and it counts up as far as1990, and there is the Buran shuttle flying off past the year 2000, into the 21st century. By the time I made my visit, the rest of the pavilion had been put to use as a garden centre.
I am fascinated by the way that history humbles us, the unknowability of the future. It seems like a good thread to follow.
It doesn’t take a history-changing failure on the scale of the Soviet collapse to leave such Ozymandian aides-memoires. After the first Dark Mountain festival in Llangollen, I went to stay with friends in South Yorkshire. One afternoon, we climbed a fence into the grounds of a place called the Earth Centre. You can find it between Rotherham and Doncaster: get off the train at a town called Conisbrough and you walk straight down from the eastbound platform to the gates of the centre, but those gates are locked. So we walked instead around the perimeter to find the quietest and least observed place to climb over, and spent an hour or so wandering around inside.
The Earth Centre was built with Millennium Lottery funding to be a kind of Eden Project of the North. It was planned as a tourist destination and an education centre about sustainable development. It had the largest solar array of its kind in Europe, when it was built; and its gardens are wonderful now, overgrown into a vision of post-apocalyptic abundance, because the Earth Centre itself turned out not to be sustainable, in some fairly mundane ways. Unable to attract the projected visitor numbers, it closed for the last time in 2004.
I can’t think about Conisbrough without also remembering the artist Rachel Horne who comes from the town, who was born during the Miner’s Strike and whose dad was a miner. Her work and her life are bound up with the experience of a community for whom the future disappeared. She grew up in a time and a place where the purpose of that small town had gone, because the pit had closed. As she took me around the town, on my first visit, one of the saddest moments came when she pointed out a set of new houses by the railway line. ‘That’s where my dad’s allotment was.’ The allotments were owned by the Coal Board, and so when the pit closed, not only did the men lose their jobs, but also their ability to grow their own food.
Horne grew up in a school that was in special measures. Her teachers would say to her, ‘you’re smart, keep your head down, get out of here as fast as you can’. She did: when she was sixteen, she left for Doncaster to study for A-levels, and then to London to art school. She was two years into art school when she turned around and went back. The work she was doing only made sense if she could ground it in the place where she had grown up, to work with the people she knew, and make work with them. So she put her degree on hold and came home to work on the first of a series of projects which have inspired me hugely, a project called Out of Darkness, Light, in which she brought her community together to honour the memory of the four hundred men and boys who had died in the history of the Cadeby Main colliery. Led by a deep instinct for what needed to be done, she had found a way back to one of the ancient and enduring functions of art, to honour the dead and, in so doing, give meaning to the living.
When we talk about ‘collapse’, there is a temptation to imagine a mythological event which lies somewhere out there in the future and which will change everything: The End Of The World As We Know It. But worlds are ending all the time; bodies of knowledge and ways of knowing are passing into memory, and beyond that into the depths of forgetting. For many people in many places, collapse is lived experience, something they have passed through and with which they go on living. What Horne’s work underlines, for me, is the entanglement between the hard, material realities of economic collapse and the subtler devastation wrought by the collapse of meaning. This double collapse is there in the stories of the South Yorkshire coalfields, as in those of the former Soviet Union.
Yet perhaps there has already been something closer to a universal collapse of meaning, a failure whose consequences are so profound that we have hardly begun to reckon with them. In some sense, ‘the future’ itself has broken.
Looking back to the 1950s and 60s, I am struck by how, even in a time when people were living under the real threat of Mutually Assured Destruction, the future still occupied such a powerful place within the cultural imagination. It was present in a technological sense – the Jetsons visions of the future which we associate with 1950s America – and in a political sense, a belief in the possibility of a revolution that would change everything and usher in a fairer society. Or, on a quieter scale, in the creation of communities oriented around a utopian vision of making a better world.
Somewhere along the way, the future seems to have disappeared, without very much comment. It doesn’t occupy the place in mainstream culture which it did forty or fifty years ago. You can look for pivots, moments at which it began to go. The fall of the Soviet Union might be one, in a sense. ‘The End of History’ was one of the famous aggrandising labels attached to those events, but perhaps ‘The End of the Future’ would be closer to the truth? Or are we dealing with another consequence of the political and cultural hopes which hinged on the events of 1968?
Perhaps it is simpler than that. If we no longer have daydreams about retiring to Mars, is it not least because fewer and fewer people are confident that retirement is still going to be there as a social phenomenon in most of our countries, by the time we reach that age? When students take to the streets of Paris or London today, it is no longer to bring about a better world, but to defend what they can of the world their parents took for granted.
So if the future is broken, how do we go about mending it? How do were-member it, gather the pieces and put them back together? Like all griefs, the journey cannot be completed without a letting-go.
Where traces of the future remain in our mainstream culture, it is as a source of anxiety, something to be distracted from. When we, as environmentalists, talk about the future, it is often in language such as ‘We have fifty months to save the planet.’ One reason I am suspicious of this way of framing our situation is that it is so clearly haunted by a desire for certainty, and for knowing, and (by implication) the control which knowledge promises. Whereas the hardest thing about the future is that it is unknown, that history does humble us, that people often fail to anticipate the events which end up shaping their lives, on a domestic or a global scale. This isn’t an argument for ignoring what we can see about the seriousness of the situation we are in, but it is an invitation to seek a humbler relationship with the future, and to be aware of the points at which our language acts as a defence against our uncertainties. It seems to me that such a historical humility may help us navigate the difficult years ahead, and perhaps begin the process of recovering from the cultural bereavement which our societies have gone through in recent decades.
When I get up from my writing and go to the balcony of this small flat, I can see on the horizon to the north the strange landmark of the Atomium, a remnant of the World Fair held here in Brussels over half a century ago. Such structures exist in an eery superimposition, relics of a future which didn’t happen. Nothing dates faster than yesterday’s idea of tomorrow. It is remote in a way which the most mysterious and illegible prehistoric remains are not, because they were once part of the lives of people more or less like ourselves. And while it is possible that your parents or grandparents were among the hundreds of thousands who, in the summer of 1958, queued to visit the abandoned future which graces this city’s skyline, they could do so only as tourists. Those huge atomic globes have never been anyone’s sanctuary or home.
The future to which such monuments are erected has little to do with the direction history is likely to take. It represents, rather, an attempt by those who hold power in the present to project themselves, to announce their inevitability in the face of the arbitrariness of history. It is a doomed colonial move, as foolish as those rulers who from time to time have sent their armies against the sea. However confidently they set their faces to the horizon, their feet rest uneasily on the ground. History will make fools of them, too, sooner or later, arriving from an unexpected direction.
Paul Celan knew this, when he wrote:
Into the rivers north of the future
I cast out the net, that you
hesitantly burden with stone-engraved shadows.
One direction from which I have begun to find help in remembering the future is the practice of improvisation.
To understand this, it may help to start with words, to pull words to pieces in order to put them back together. ‘To provide’ is to have foresight. The word improvisation is very close to the word ‘improvident’, and to be improvident is not to have looked ahead and made provision. ‘To improvise’ turns that around, into something positive, because improvisation is the skill of acting without knowing what is coming next, of being comfortable with the unknown, with uncertainty, with unpredictability.
I have come to see improvisation as the deep skill and attitude which we need for the times that we’re already in and heading further into. Part of the truth of how climate change, for example, will play out at the level where we actually live our lives is through increased unpredictability. Less able to rely on processes and systems which we have taken for granted, we are confronted by our lack of control. This will throw us acute practical challenges, but also – as in the coalfield communities of Rachel Horne’s life and work – the challenge of holding our sense of meaning together in times of drastic change.
When you consider the history of improvisation, you encounter something like a paradox. Because it is arguably the basic human skill, the thing that we are good at. It is what we have been doing for tens of thousands of years, over meals and around camp fires, in the marketplace, the tea house or the pub. Every conversation you have is an improvisation: words are coming out of your mouth which you didn’t plan or script or anticipate. And yet we are accustomed to thinking of improvisation as a specialist skill, a kind of social tightrope-walking; this magic of being able to perform, to draw meaning from thin air, to make people laugh or make them think without having had it all written out beforehand.
Our fear of improvisation is, at least in part, a result of what industrial societies have been like and what they have done to us. I want to offer the distinction between ‘improvisation’ and ‘orchestration’ as two different principles by which people come together and do things. In these terms, we could talk about the industrial era as having been peculiarly dominated by orchestration.
Orchestration is the mode of organisation in which great amounts of effort are synchronised, coordinated and harnessed to the control of a single will. At the simplest physical level, picture the large orchestras of the nineteenth century: the coordinated movements of a first violin section are not so different to the coordinated movements of workers in a factory. The position of the conductor standing on the podium is not so different to the position of the politicians, democratic or otherwise, of the industrial era, addressing unprecedented numbers of people through new technologies which make it possible for one voice to be amplified far beyond its true reach.
The same shift away from improvisation can be seen in the basic activities of buying and selling. Think of the marketplace, a space in which economic activity is tangled up with all kinds of other sociable activities, a place for telling stories, hearing songs, catching up on news, eating, drinking, meeting members of the opposite sex (or members of the same sex). The social practices of buying and selling in the marketplace are themselves full of sociable performance. Haggling is not only a means of coming to a price, it is a playful encounter, a moment of improvisation. From there, swing to the opposite extreme, the huge department-store windows of the later nineteenth century, their shock-and-awe spectacle before which all one can do is stand silent, mouth open; just as, for the first time, it had become the convention that an audience would sit in silence in the theatre, a silence which would have been unimaginable to Shakespeare.
The story of the industrial era can be told as the story of a time in which orchestration paid off, allowing us to produce more stuff and to solve real problems. Of course, there were always challenges to be made, and around the edges we find the other stories of those who challenged the dehumanisation, the liquidation of social and cultural fabric, the counterproductivity and the ecological destruction. (Set these against the changes in life expectancy and infant mortality over the same generations, and perhaps the only human response is a refusal to draw up accounts; an assertion of the incommensurability of reality, of the need to ‘hold everything dear’.)
What we can say is that, increasingly, even within our industrial societies and the places to which they have brought us, the pay-offs of orchestration are breaking down. Systems become more complex and unstable; it becomes less effective to project the will of one person or of a central decision-making process through huge numbers of others. Under such circumstances, improvisation – the old skill edged out by the awesome machinery of Progress – may be returning from the margins.
There is another thread here, concerning time – time and desire – which could help us draw together this story of orchestration and improvisation with the question of the broken future.
Since I began talking and writing about the failure of the future, I have noticed two kinds of response, which might broadly be identified as a postmodern and a retro-modern attitude. The first shrugs ironically, ‘Worry about it later!’ A hyperreal refuge-taking in the present, in a consumer reality where styles of every time and period are mashed together with no reference to the history or the culture which produced them, in one seemingly endless now. Against this, there emerges a second, more alarmed attitude, which manifests as a kind of nostalgic modernism; a desire to reinstate the future as a thing which can inspire us, which can be a vessel for our hopes.
However desperately, sincerely or cynically they are held, it seems to me that neither of these attitudes will do. They are not up to the situation in which we find ourselves. So where else do we turn? One route to another attitude may be to say that the role of the future which characterised the modern era was never satisfactory. There was something already wrong with it. Yes, it has broken down – and the fact that people just don’t like to think about the future is part of what makes it difficult for us to motivate and inspire others to do the things we know need doing, if we’re to limit the damage we are going to live through. But the answer is not a return to the heroic striving towards the future which structured the ideologies of industrial modernity. Because that was already twisted, a tearing out of shape of time, that could only end badly.
Another story we could tell about the age of industrial modernity, of capitalism and the changing culture in which it flourished, is the story of the loss of timeliness. Max Weber saw the origins of this economic culture in the Protestant work ethic, a new emphasis on hard work and frugality as proof of salvation.3 Historians have questioned his account, but in broader terms, the journey to the world as we know it has been marked by shifts away from the sensuous and the specific, towards the abstract and exchangeable; and one of the axes along which this has taken place is our relationship to time. Not least, the shift from a world of seasonal festivals to a world of Sabbath observance marked a new detachment from the living, sensuous cycles surrounding us. (The replacement of the festive calendar with the weekly cycle also happened to offer the factory owner a more consistent return on his capital.) With this detachment from rhythm and season, there was also a loss of that sense which surfaces in the Book of Ecclesiastes, that there is a time for everything:
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,a time to love and a time to hate,
Ecclesiastes 3:5-8
a time for war and a time for peace.This contextual, rhythmic sense of our place in the world gives way to a preference for abstract, absolute principles. The universalism which was always strong in monotheistic traditions is now let fully off the leash of lived experience, engendering new kinds of rigidity and intolerance (though also the progressive universalism which will drive, for example, the movement to abolish slavery).
Following the line of this story, we could see the history of capitalism as a history of the contortion of the relationship between time and desire. In its earlier form, to be a good economic citizen is to work hard today for a deferred reward; the repressive morality we associate with the Victorian era is then a cultural manifestation of this perpetually-deferred gratification. To push this further, perhaps the cultural upheavals of the second half of the twentieth century represent a similar knock-on effect of the lurch from producer to consumer capitalism? In the countries of the post-industrial West, to be a good economic citizen is now to spend on your credit card today and worry how you’ll pay for it later. Despite the glimpses of freedom as we pivoted from one contortion to the other, desire remains harnessed to the engine of ever-expanding GDP; only, we have switched from the gear of deferred gratification to that of instant gratification.
The cultural experiment of debt-fuelled consumption appears to be already entering its endgame. When its costs are finally counted, perhaps the loss of the future which we have been retracing will be listed among them?
Whatever stories we tell, each of them is only one route across a landscape. Some routes are wiser than others, and some are older than memory. As we turn for home, let us find our way by an old story.
Of all the figures in Greek myth, few seemed more at home in the era of industrial modernity than Prometheus. The ingenious Titan who stole fire from the gods stood as an icon of the technological leap into the future. Once again, words themselves are full of clues. Prometheus means ‘forethought’. He has a brother, whose name is Epimetheus, meaning ‘afterthought’, or hindsight. The figure of the fool, stumbling backwards, not knowing where he is going. His foolishness is confirmed when he insists, despite the warnings of Prometheus, on accepting Pandora as a gift from the gods, and with her the famous jar. And so, the story goes, came all the evils into the world. It is a deeply misogynist story; but we are not at the bottom of it. Dwelling on the name, Pandora, ‘The All-Giver’, there is the suggestion of an older path, a deeper level at which Pandora is not simply another slandered Eve, but an embodiment of nature’s abundance and our belonging within its generous embrace.v
The name of Epimetheus may long ago have been eclipsed by that of his forward-looking brother, but there is one great, unnamed, high modern icon made in his image; the figure conjured up in the ninth of Walter Benjamin’s theses on the philosophy of history:
A Klee drawing named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling ruin upon ruin and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
‘On the Concept of History’ (1940)Written in the shadow of the Second World War, this is the tragic obverse of modernity’s idolisation of the future; to look backwards is always to have hindsight, and hindsight is forever useless.
But perhaps there is more to hindsight than Benjamin’s dark vision allows. Those who practice improvisation talk about the importance of looking backwards. Keith Johnstone, one of the founders of modern theatrical improvisation, writes powerfully about improvisation as an attitude to life, a mode of navigating reality. In one passage, he describes the kind of wise foolishness which it takes to improvise a story, in strikingly Epimethean terms:
The improviser has to be like a man walking backwards. He sees where he has been, but he pays no attention to the future. His story can take him anywhere, but he must still ‘balance’ it, and give it shape, by remembering incidents that have been shelved and reincorporating them. Very often an audience will applaud when earlier material is brought back into the story. They couldn’t tell you why they applaud, but the reincorporation does give them pleasure.
Impro: Improvisation and the TheatreThere is a deep satisfaction at the moment when something from earlier in the story is woven back in, for the listener and for the storyteller. In that moment, another dimension emerges, beyond the arbitrariness of linear time, and we sense the embrace of the cyclical. There is the feeling of pattern and meaning, of things coming together. The ritual has worked.
If Johnstone’s account of the craft of improvisation echoes with the footsteps of Epimetheus, in Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society he is invoked by name. In the closing chapter of his great critique of the counterproductivity of our education systems, Illich looks towards ‘The Dawn of Epimethean Man’. The Promethean spirit of homo faber has taken us to the moon, but that was the easy part; the challenge is to find our way home, to find each other again across the aching distances our technologies have created.
Illich reminds his readers of the sequel to the myth. Epimetheus stays with Pandora, and their daughter Pyrrha goes on to marry Deucalion, the son of Prometheus. When an angered Zeus sends an earth-drowning deluge, it is Deucalion and Pyrrha who build an ark and survive to repeople the land. Writing in 1970, Illich could find resonance in this idea of a union of the Promethean and Epimethean attitudes, carrying humanity through a time of ecological disaster. Forty years on, perhaps the symmetry simply seems too neat to hold such weight.
And yet, in practical terms, I think that there may be some fragments of truth here. What gets us through the times ahead may well be those moments when we look backwards and find something from earlier in the story that we can pull through, that becomes useful again. Our leaders are very fond of talking about ‘innovation’, the point at which some new device enters social reality; we don’t seem to have an equivalent word for when things that are old-fashioned, obsolete and redundant come into their own in the hour of need. (I think of the knights in shining armour sleeping under the hill in the Legend of Alderley, as told by Alan Garner’s grandfather, and in so many other folk stories.) I think we may need such a word, because as the systems we grew up depending on become less reliable, we will find ourselves drawing on things that worked in other times and places.
There is another clue here as to why official projections of the future date so quickly. If you want to imagine what the future is going to be like, it is a mistake to assume that it will be populated by the products, tools and systems which look most ‘futuristic’, or those most marvellously optimised for present circumstances. These are the things which have been tested against the narrowest range of possible times and places. The supermarket, for example, has been with us for two generations. On the other hand, the sociable, improvisational marketplace has endured through an extraordinary range of times and places. Almost anywhere that human beings have lived in significant numbers, there have been meeting points where people come together to trade, to share news, to exchange goods, to make decisions. Just now, it may survive as a luxury phenomenon, a place to buy hand-crafted cheeses and organic vegetables. Yet the cheaper prices in Tesco this year do not cancel out the suspicion that the marketplace will continue to exist in any number of quite imaginable futures, where today’s globe-spanning systems become too expensive and unreliable to sustain the supermarket business model.
Whether we like it or not, we must live with the unknowability of the future, its capacity to humble us and take us by surprise, our inability to control it. This need not be a source of despair, nor is the choice simply between the hyperreal distractions of postmodernity and an effort to reignite the process of Progress. There is inspiration to be found in our own foolishness, stumbling backwards, muddling through, relearning the craft of making it up as we go along; cooking from the ingredients to hand, rather than starting with a recipe. If the collapse of meaning is as much of a threat as the material realities of economic and ecological collapse, not least because it debilitates us when we need all our resilience to handle those realities, then the art of finding meaning in the weaving together of past and future is not a luxury. Meanwhile, the spirit of Epimetheus should inspire us to treat the past not as an object of romantic fantasy, but nor as a dustbin of discarded prototypes. Learning how people have made life work in other times and places is one way of readying ourselves for the unknown territory north of the future, in which all our expectations may be confounded.
After all the evils of the world, one thing is left at the bottom of Pandora’s jar: hope. As Illich comments, hope is not the same as expectation. It is not optimism, or a plan. It’s not knowing what’s going to happen. But it is an attitude which enables you to keep taking one step after another into the unknown.
Johnstone never makes explicit reference to Epimetheus, but at the very end of his handbook on improvisation, he recounts three short dreams, the kind that ‘announce themselves as messages’. The last of these seems particularly familiar, like a name that is on the tip of everyone’s tongue:
There is a box that we are forbidden to open. It contains a great serpent and once opened this monster will stream out forever. I lift the lid, and for a moment it seems as if the serpent will destroy us; but then it dissipates into thin air, and there, at the bottom of the box, is the real treasure.
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Defusing the Apocalypse: A Response to John Gray
Published on the Dark Mountain Website, following John Gray’s review of Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto in the New Statesman.
When Paul and I wrote the Dark Mountain manifesto, our hope was start a conversation. Over the past few weeks, we’ve been encouraged by how far this has spread, and by the range and thoughtfulness (in most cases) of the responses we’ve received.
In a good conversation, you don’t just reiterate the first thing you said: listening and engaging with how you are heard by others can lead you to explore further, think harder, revisit earlier attempts to put things into words. In that spirit, I want to pick up on one of the most recent and high profile contributions we have seen. A couple of weeks ago, in the New Statesman, the author and political philosopher John Gray published a detailed review of our manifesto – an unexpected honour for a small, self-published pamphlet. Gray is generous and, up to a point, sympathetic:
Much in contemporary thought is made up of myths masquerading as facts, and it is refreshing to see these myths clearly identified as such. The authors are right that none is more powerful than the idea that we are separate from the natural world, and free to use it as we see fit…
He questions, though, whether ‘civilisation’ can also be treated as a myth, and he detects in the manifesto a desire for ‘a cleansing catastrophe… a Romantic dream that history has proved wrong time and again.’
‘Romantic’ is a term that has been used more than once in criticism of this project, not all of it as measured and thoughtful as this review. The territory we are exploring comes with a danger of sliding into Romanticism – one we may not always have avoided successfully. It is easy to get carried away. Yet when Gray describes our perspective as ‘apocalyptic’, I think there is a misunderstanding going on, rooted in a difference between our understandings of ‘myth’ and of the role of the imagination in human history.
Of the various authors we mention in the manifesto, there is one I would want to reconsider. Not Conrad, whom Gray suggests we misread – but Cormac McCarthy, included in our list of ‘voices… rooted in a sense of place’. We have discussed The Road on this blog before: it is a remarkable novel, the work of a master craftsman who can work language like few of his contemporaries. Even so, I would hesitate to hold it up as an example of the kind of writing this project is about.
In fact, in my Long Now talk and elsewhere, I have used The Road as a marker for the imaginative challenge facing us. What McCarthy offers is the most brilliant literary expression of the nightmare which haunts our collective imagination. Its scenes present a photographic negative of the world as we know it, framed by the icons of contemporary civilisation: the man and boy push a shopping cart; the internal combustion engine may be almost extinct, yet their instincts drive them down a tarmac road; what may be the last ever can of CocaCola appears as a sacramental gift from the world before the never-quite-defined Fall.
At some level, though we may not wish to, we find it easy to imagine such a nightmare, because it validates one of the defining beliefs of our civilisation: that life without the supermarket and the superhighway is not liveable. What is harder is to imagine futures in which we do not have many of the things we take for granted, but in which life turns out still to be liveable. When we assert that the converging crises of our century present a cultural challenge, as distinct from the political and technological responses generally called for, it is this imaginative work which we have in mind. This is not about conjuring up apocalyptic visions, but defusing the apocalypse which already haunts us. As we put it in the principles which close the manifesto, ‘The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop.’
Here, we hit what may be the basic difference between Gray’s position and ours: how much does the imagination matter? Do myths shape reality, or merely obscure it?
So far as I can tell, when Gray talks about myths, he sees them as a means by which people try to escape from facts: hence, the “dream-driven” nature of the human animal stands between it and any likelihood of sanity. Whereas the Dark Mountain attitude is that some dreams are saner than others and that myths serve us as a navigation aid. When we talk about “the myth of civilisation”, our issue is not that it is a myth, but that it is a bad myth: a map which has brought us a long way, but which no longer corresponds to the landscape, and never really did. As we write:
It has led the human race to achieve what it has achieved; and has led the planet into the age of ecocide. The two are intimately linked. We believe they must be decoupled if anything is to remain.
‘Uncivilisation’ is this process of decoupling, of reworking the myths by which we live.
Whether this matters depends on how we understand the relationship between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ in shaping human history: to what extent is our fate dictated by human nature, biological drives, competition for resources? To what extent do our practices and beliefs also shape it? Gray believes overwhelmingly in the role of nature – and seems to regard any belief in a significant role for culture as humanist (in the sense of treating humans as uniquely exempt from nature) and utopian. It feels to me like there is a gap here.
Certainly, to view culture as a uniquely human phenomenon is humanist – but, along the lines of David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous, I am inclined to see this as a starting point for a broader conception of culture, which is open to the cultural aspect of non-human behaviour.
As for Utopia, it is one thing to reject the pursuit of heaven on earth – and another to deny that some times and places are better to live in than others, and that the beliefs and practices of the people living there play a significant role in this. Gray doesn’t seem to regard this distinction as significant, which may be why his historical vision tends towards the monochrome – and sometimes towards what I think of as the CNN version of history, as when he claims (in Black Mass) that ‘over the long run war is as common as peace’. (An alien tuning in to CNN would doubtless conclude that humans spend a large amount of their time killing each other, but this would not make it true. As with news, so with history, war generates more column inches than peace.)
It seems to me that it is possible to share much of Gray’s critique of humanism and of utopian thinking, while taking a different attitude to the balance between nature and culture. Human nature, resource scarcity and other facts of this order are always modulated through a cultural layer which may substantially alter how they play out: ‘reality’, lived experience, is the result of these interactions, not a pure factual terrain underlying the delusion of culture. Some times and places are better to live in than others – and this is down (for example) not only to the material abundance or scarcity of things people depend on, but also to the social and cultural construction of scarcity, which has a great deal to do with the stories people tell each other about what the world is like.
The Dark Mountain Project is a cultural movement – both in the narrow sense, that it is primarily about the role of writers, artists and others who work with the imagination, and in the broad sense, that it is about the habits, beliefs, artefacts and practices by which we live and make meaning. We do not suggest that cultural responses should be the only responses to the crises we face, only that without them we may find ourselves in even greater trouble than we are already.
Hope and wishful thinking are often mistaken for each other. A great deal of sustainability talk is wishful thinking dressed up as hope, because people are too afraid to look directly at what they know about the situation we are in. If we really advocated, as Gray puts it, ‘[awaiting] disaster in the hope that the difficulties will magically disappear’, that would also be wishful thinking. For me, though, the ‘hope beyond hope’ which we write about is closer to what Ivan Illich described, interviewed at the time of the Brundtland Report, when he contrasted the vision of ‘sustainable development’ with the reality around him in Mexico:
Some novelists, like Doris Lessing in The Fifth Child, create a sense of the emergent future, of what kinds of relationships are possible in the ruins. There is a sense in Lessing’s writings of the frightening beings who have survival capacity.
It is fascinating to discover this shared experience of outsiders in post-earthquake, pre-ecological apocalypse Mexico City. There is something here of the taste of the gang, the ragpicker, the garbage dump dweller. Our difficulty is finding a language to speak about this alternative, because, contrary to professional wisdom, people with unmet basic needs are surviving with new forms of conviviality.
That is hardly a utopian picture, but it is one which includes the relentless human capacity for improvisation, for going on, for picking our way through the mess we make and continuing to find meaning in it all – beyond the point where the language of ‘sustainable development’ runs out of things to say.
There’s a great quotation, used by Gray as an epigraph for Black Mass, which makes me want to go and read Joseph de Maistre’s St Petersburg Dialogues, from which it is taken:
THE SENATOR: This is an abyss into which it is better not to look.
THE COUNT: My friend, we are not free not to look.That we could easily have used that in the Dark Mountain manifesto says something about the overlap between the territory we are exploring. In writing this, I have been conscious of places where I could be misconstruing Gray’s position. As the project unfolds, I hope there will be opportunities to continue this conversation with him and with others who raise questions or propose routes we haven’t thought of.