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--- resilients:dougald_hine_interview [2013-01-16 18:12] – Dougald's edits 83.226.144.73
+++ resilients:dougald_hine_interview [2013-02-08 07:23] – nik
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-===Interview with Dougald Hine. Rab, Croatia July 2012===
+===Interview with Dougald Hine, The Resilients' Artist in Transience. Rab, Croatia July 2012===
-Interviewer: How do you describe yourself?
+**Interviewer**: How do you describe yourself?
-Dougald: My usual short answer is that I start organisations as a way to avoid finishing books: I'm a writer, but I'm easily distracted. I'm interested in how new things come about, how change happens, how new things enter social reality. The process by which something goes from being something no one quite has a way of saying to something that everyone is talking about. Or the process by which things go from being a conversation, an idea that comes out of nowhere when a group of people are jamming together around the table, to something that captures people's imagination, something that affects people in really down-to-earth, concrete ways. Because I'm interested in that stuff, I've ended up spending quite a lot of my time in the last few years being part of groups of people who create new projects, who create new organisations. There was a web start-up called School of Everything which was inspired by ideas from Ivan Ilich from the early '70s about learning webs, about using networks to route around institutions and allow us to organise our own learning. There's an agency in London called Spacemakers, which is a kind of civic ideas agency, bringing people together to reinvent and re-imagine spaces and places, and doing practical projects on the ground with local people that come out of that process. There's something called the Dark Mountain project which started as a manifesto that I wrote with a guy called Paul Kingsnorth who used to be the editor of The Ecologist magazine. That came out of our frustration with the narrowing of environmentalism down to carbon counting and looking for technical and political fixes, and us saying, unless we ask the cultural questions about how we got into this mess, we're sunk. It's only by asking those questions that we have a chance of keeping going at the point, when we realise that carbon counting and the technical fixes are not going to get us out of the mess we're in, that a lot of this is actually stuff that is just, it's going to happen. We're not going to make our current way of living sustainable. That was never either a realistic or actually a desirable goal to begin with. And from that manifesto, that's ended up being a series of books, it's ended up being a festival that happens once a year in the UK. Before I ended up in Sweden, there was already a group that had started up there which organised their own Dark Mountain Festival there, so it's kind of a cultural movement. So somehow as a way of distracting myself from these books that I actually want to be getting on with writing, I've ended up spending up most of my productive time over the last few years instead being one of the instigators of these various apparently quite different projects and organisations.
+**Dougald**: My usual short answer is that I start organisations as a way to avoid finishing books: I'm a writer, but I'm easily distracted. I'm interested in how new things come about, how change happens, how new things enter social reality. The process by which something goes from being something no one quite has a way of saying to something that everyone is talking about. Or the process by which things go from being a conversation, an idea that comes out of nowhere when a group of people are jamming together around the table, to something that captures people's imagination, something that affects people in really down-to-earth, concrete ways.
-Interviewer: What connects all of these different projects, in your view?
+Because I'm interested in that stuff, I've ended up spending quite a lot of my time in the last few years being part of groups of people who create new projects, who create new organisations. There was a web start-up called School of Everything which was inspired by ideas from Ivan Ilich from the early '70s about learning webs, about using networks to route around institutions and allow us to organise our own learning. There's an agency in London called Spacemakers, which is a kind of civic ideas agency, bringing people together to reinvent and re-imagine spaces and places, and doing practical projects on the ground with local people that come out of that process. There's something called the Dark Mountain project which started as a manifesto that I wrote with a guy called Paul Kingsnorth who used to be the editor of The Ecologist magazine. That came out of our frustration with the narrowing of environmentalism down to carbon counting and looking for technical and political fixes, and us saying, unless we ask the cultural questions about how we got into this mess, we're sunk. It's only by asking those questions that we have a chance of keeping going at the point, when we realise that carbon counting and the technical fixes are not going to get us out of the mess we're in, that a lot of this is actually stuff that is just, it's going to happen. We're not going to make our current way of living sustainable. That was never either a realistic or actually a desirable goal to begin with. And from that manifesto, that's ended up being a series of books, it's ended up being a festival that happens once a year in the UK. Before I ended up in Sweden, there was already a group that had started up there which organised their own Dark Mountain Festival there, so it's kind of a cultural movement. So somehow as a way of distracting myself from these books that I actually want to be getting on with writing, I've ended up spending up most of my productive time over the last few years instead being one of the instigators of these various apparently quite different projects and organisations.
-Dougald: I think the principle for me that is common to them all is not mistaking the way we happen to do things for the thing we're trying to do. You could approach that from one angle and see that as a sort of design principle, a kind of rule of thumb for innovation, and so on. But to me that actually comes as much from Illich and from a historical, political critique of the counterproductivity and the destructiveness of many of the ways we happen to be doing things. In Illich's critiques of institutions in the '70s, he says that beyond a certain point our education systems make us stupider as societies, our health systems make us more ill. The ways that we happen to be doing things are often achieving the opposite, or losing the things that matter most in the process. From that critique, I drew this principle of always keep that distinction in view. Keep the distinction between the deep social good that lies behind education, that's the reason why people treat education systems as things that matter so much, and the actual social structures and institutions and bureaucracies that we find ourselves with, which may quite possibly have run their course as homes for that deep social good. And at that point, if you're making that distinction, you might be able to recognize small pockets, marginal projects, things going on on the edges that become more hospitable to the social good, the thing we're trying to do, than the institution which bears the formal monopoly on that good within our society. (In other words, that is the only thing that we're meant to take seriously as a home for Education with a capital E.) So to me, that's the common ground between School of Everything and Spacemakers, in the sense that what we do with those projects is to come in and look at a place with people and hopefully see some things which were not present in the way that people were talking about it, but which are true to what was there already, rather than classic regeneration where you're parachuting stuff in from 30,000 feet. Looking at situations and re-describing them on the basis that that gap or that distinction is usually a source of potential. Resilience is not a term that I have used very much in my work, so when I was asked to do this I had to think about how I could connect it to things that feel like commonsense, that feel grounded, that feel meaningful for me. One of my reservations about resilience as a term is that it gets very bound up with systems thinking and systems talk. I don't want to go into all of the issues that I have with the dominance of that way of describing the world, but apart from anything else I think one of the things that happens is that people get stuck in a very vague, hand-wavy, high-level systemsy conversation about Everything, which can actually become a means of distracting ourselves from the concrete realities that resilience might point towards. And so I started out from the beginning of this project saying, for my purposes, I'm going to talk about resilience as 'the capacity to endure', and I'm going to be curious about why it is that some people, some projects, some organisations, some societies, some countries seem to keep going in situations where others give up. To me, that's one thing that we could use 'resilience' as a sign post towards: this curious thing of, what is it that means some of us feel it's worth keeping going in the really hard times, when other people crumble or collapse. When I was thinking about that, I went back and was re-reading some of Dmitri Orlov's writings about his experiences of observing the collapse of the Soviet Union, and one of the things he says is that the people who are worst hit by real social and economic collapse tend to be successful men over the age of 40. Because the whole framework within which they have succeeded, (their identities are so linked to their careers,) tends to be one of the first things that disappears. Because it turns out that that was a social game being played within that society and that economic order. Now, when that society and that economic order collapses, it's not that there is no food left, it's not that there is no capacity to stay alive left, but the structures of meaning that have been what people have stayed alive //for// disappear and many of those people end up drinking themselves to death. A lot of the story of the collapsing male life expectancy in the '90s in Russia has to do with that. It's a collapse of meaning, because if people have meaning they're actually surprisingly resilient. This is part of what I'm digging at with this thing of saying, let's talk about resilience on the assumption that the cultural is not a superficial layer, but something that goes all of the way down. This takes us, actually, to what I've been doing in practice on my journey as the pilot journey of Resilients guild, which is whirling around Europe very fast, having conversations with people, getting glimpses of things. And one of the things that I've been following in those conversations is the idea that the abstraction we might call 'resilience' always actually exists in a social and cultural context and in different places - and in different times, as well - people have a different version of that. The Czech version of resilience is a much darker and more pessimistic thing, for example, than the German version would be one of my observations.
+**Interviewer**: What connects all of these different projects, in your view?
+**Dougald**: I think the principle for me that is common to them all is not mistaking the way we happen to do things for the thing we're trying to do. You could approach that from one angle and see that as a sort of design principle, a kind of rule of thumb for innovation, and so on. But to me that actually comes as much from Illich and from a historical, political critique of the counterproductivity and the destructiveness of many of the ways we happen to be doing things. In Illich's critiques of institutions in the '70s, he says that beyond a certain point our education systems make us stupider as societies, our health systems make us more ill. The ways that we happen to be doing things are often achieving the opposite, or losing the things that matter most in the process. From that critique, I drew this principle of always keep that distinction in view. Keep the distinction between the deep social good that lies behind education, that's the reason why people treat education systems as things that matter so much, and the actual social structures and institutions and bureaucracies that we find ourselves with, which may quite possibly have run their course as homes for that deep social good. And at that point, if you're making that distinction, you might be able to recognize small pockets, marginal projects, things going on on the edges that become more hospitable to the social good, the thing we're trying to do, than the institution which bears the formal monopoly on that good within our society. (In other words, that is the only thing that we're meant to take seriously as a home for Education with a capital E.) So to me, that's the common ground between School of Everything and Spacemakers, in the sense that what we do with those projects is to come in and look at a place with people and hopefully see some things which were not present in the way that people were talking about it, but which are true to what was there already, rather than classic regeneration where you're parachuting stuff in from 30,000 feet.
+Looking at situations and re-describing them on the basis that that gap or that distinction is usually a source of potential. Resilience is not a term that I have used very much in my work, so when I was asked to do this I had to think about how I could connect it to things that feel like commonsense, that feel grounded, that feel meaningful for me. One of my reservations about resilience as a term is that it gets very bound up with systems thinking and systems talk. I don't want to go into all of the issues that I have with the dominance of that way of describing the world, but apart from anything else I think one of the things that happens is that people get stuck in a very vague, hand-wavy, high-level systemsy conversation about Everything, which can actually become a means of distracting ourselves from the concrete realities that resilience might point towards. And so I started out from the beginning of this project saying, for my purposes, I'm going to talk about resilience as 'the capacity to endure', and I'm going to be curious about why it is that some people, some projects, some organisations, some societies, some countries seem to keep going in situations where others give up. To me, that's one thing that we could use 'resilience' as a sign post towards: this curious thing of, what is it that means some of us feel it's worth keeping going in the really hard times, when other people crumble or collapse. When I was thinking about that, I went back and was re-reading some of Dmitri Orlov's writings about his experiences of observing the collapse of the Soviet Union, and one of the things he says is that the people who are worst hit by real social and economic collapse tend to be successful men over the age of 40. Because the whole framework within which they have succeeded, (their identities are so linked to their careers,) tends to be one of the first things that disappears. Because it turns out that that was a social game being played within that society and that economic order. Now, when that society and that economic order collapses, it's not that there is no food left, it's not that there is no capacity to stay alive left, but the structures of meaning that have been what people have stayed alive //for// disappear and many of those people end up drinking themselves to death. A lot of the story of the collapsing male life expectancy in the '90s in Russia has to do with that. It's a collapse of meaning, because if people have meaning they're actually surprisingly resilient. This is part of what I'm digging at with this thing of saying, let's talk about resilience on the assumption that the cultural is not a superficial layer, but something that goes all of the way down. This takes us, actually, to what I've been doing in practice on my journey as the pilot journey of Resilients guild, which is whirling around Europe very fast, having conversations with people, getting glimpses of things. And one of the things that I've been following in those conversations is the idea that the abstraction we might call 'resilience' always actually exists in a social and cultural context and in different places - and in different times, as well - people have a different version of that. The Czech version of resilience is a much darker and more pessimistic thing, for example, than the German version would be one of my observations.
 Interviewer: That was actually a question that I want to ask you. Can you give some examples of what you've been encountering during those journeys, concrete examples of what it is in resilience that you've been encountering, how, and...?
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 Dougald: The conclusion of this project I'm doing at the moment for me will be to try and write up the questions that we need to think about in order to make some good design decisions about what the future of the resilience guild might be. I think that there's a rich potential in the idea of the guild. It has the capacity to be a nice crossing point. It has the capacity to provide a sufficient degree of legibility for individuals and collectively. One of the things that I used to like about being a journalist was that it gave you a simple answer to the question of why you were asking a question. It gave you a license to be curious. It gave you a license to invite yourself behind the scenes, and I think that it would be possible to construct a relatively light guild structure which, particularly in that journeyer role, gave people a license to be curious - not an automatic right to be allowed in, but an easier frame to explain why you're asking to be allowed in. I see the beginning of something useful there, but there are questions of rhythm and timeliness around this role. How do you get it right? I think in some ways I've been demonstrating how //not// to do it, with the kind of absurd speed. It's like when you're a kid and you spin round and round to make yourself dizzy. That's how I feel after the first few weeks. But in terms of the questions I want to frame as what I give back, out of having been allowed to take and play with this role as the journeyer, some of those questions will be about timeliness, both in terms of what's the appropriate rhythm and pace for moving on from place to place, for inviting yourself to stay, for how you make yourself useful or, at least, not a burden in that process. But I think also there's a question of timeliness in terms of time of life as well. The old guild structure of the apprenticeship, then being a journeyer, and then being a master, reflects three stages in life, and I've been conscious of this on my travels, of feeling actually a little bit out of joint in terms of where I'm at in my stage in life. Five years ago would have been a better time for me, or even two years ago, to be a journeyer. I'm at the point where I'm ready to settle, and to make a household, and to figure out what it means to be me in that phase of life, as opposed to the relatively rootless phase of life. I suspect that there is also a virtue in waiting until one has figured out something about what one's practice is, and developed a certain level of competence in it, before one's going to get the best out of going on a journey like this. So there's probably a window when it's the opportune phase. That, to me, is going to be part of what I try and give back as a set of questions and a framing of how the journeyer role might work in future.
-In the same way as I'm quite conscious of the speed and brevity of the visits that I've been making to places as being consciously absurd, there's been a conscious absurdity in the way that the Peregrini have been traveling. I talked to Robert about it and he was intent on taking a stupid amount of stuff, on using - this bit didn't quite happen, but - powering lights on the back of the bicycle off the energy of them pedaling that were impractical. Building these chapels along the way. There's a deliberate irrationality to that. And there's something interesting there, because that relates back to culture and the unmeasurable, and so on. Lacan talks about this, the idea of sacred value being created through actions which do not make sense, either in terms of use or exchange, so sacrifice is deliberately wasting something in order to open up that space of the sacred, which is a space which is outside of the rationality of the grid of economic reality as we know it. It's interesting as well to me that the Peregrini have been reaching for another anachronistic form, just as you can say that the guild is an anachronistic form. Deliberately borrowing from another time, another world, rather than using a more immediately available and modern practice. It's interesting that, again, the Peregrini have been borrowing from pilgrimage. Somehow, it feels like we're all kind of drawn to this idea that we can be truer to what we're trying to do by deliberately appropriating something from another time and place than we could if we framed what we were doing in more rational terms. Creating a guild is a different decision than creating a social movement, because there's not a consensus that the historical era of social movements as we've known them in the 20th century is over, whereas there is a consensus that the guild belongs to another historical epoch.And that I find striking.
+In the same way as I'm quite conscious of the speed and brevity of the visits that I've been making to places as being consciously absurd, there's been a conscious absurdity in the way that the Peregrini have been travelling. I talked with Robert about this and he was intent on taking a stupid amount of stuff, on having - this bit didn't quite happen, but - all kinds of lights on the back of the bicycle that would be powered off the energy of them pedalling, that would be impractical. Building these chapels along the way, there's a deliberate irrationality to that. And there's something interesting there, because that relates back to culture and the unmeasurable. Lacan talks about this, the idea of sacred value being created through actions which do not make sense, either in terms of use or exchange. Sacrifice is deliberately wasting something in order to open up that space of the sacred, which is a space which is outside of the rationality of the grid of economic reality as we know it. It's interesting as well, to me, that the Peregrini have been reaching for another anachronistic form, just as you can say that the guild is an anachronistic form. Deliberately borrowing from another time, another world, rather than using a more immediately available and modern practice. It's interesting that, again, the Peregrini have been borrowing from pilgrimage. Somehow, it feels like we're all kind of drawn to this idea that we can be truer to what we're trying to do by deliberately appropriating something from another time and place than we could if we framed what we were doing in more rational terms. Creating a guild is a different kind of decision to creating a social movement, because there's not a consensus that the historical era of social movements as we've known them in the 20th century is over, whereas there is a consensus that the guild belongs to another historical epoch. And that I find striking.
 Interviewer: If there is one vision, is there an image you have of the future?
-Dougald: The hope is in the remarkable capacity to keep going. Projects fail. People survive. Hope is people going on getting up in the morning, having children, finding ways to make ends meet. The things that make life worth living have never been grand goals of modernity, the grand utopias. It's a meal shared with friends. It's telling stories about the hardship or the absurdity or the injustice, and through the act of telling the story and that being heard and shared, the appeal to something which is hard to put our finger on. But somehow keeping going is its own evidence, its own form of hope, and the kind of loud stories of optimism are often people trying to drown out their own lack of hope. There's a guy who has written a couple of extraordinary books about improvisation that have influenced me a lot, Keith Johnston, and I got fascinated by improvisation for a whole load of reasons, partially because it literally means the absence of foresight. Improvisation is the art of living without being able to see what is coming next. It takes in providence, which is the great vice of capitalism, and inverts it into a virtue, I'm going to get good at being improvident, and develop the skills for being okay with not knowing what's coming next. With not having been able to prepare for the future because the future is always going to come and surprise us and make fools of us. At a certain point Johnston says here, "When you're improvising a story, you shouldn't worry about what's coming next. You should be like someone walking backwards, looking for the moment where you can weave something back in from earlier on in the story. And that moment is always the moment where you as a story teller or a comedian or whatever and the audience have the best experience in telling of a story." I think that's because meaning has something to do with the coming into alignment of the cyclical and the linear, and we get the sensation of that coming into alignment when suddenly something from what we were talking about an hour ago connects back into what we're talking about now, and it feels like the past isn't irrelevant, the past isn't lost.
+Dougald: The hope is in the remarkable capacity to keep going. Projects fail. People survive. Hope is people going on getting up in the morning, having children, finding ways to make ends meet. The things that make life worth living have never been the grand goals of modernity, the grand utopias. It's a meal shared with friends. It's telling stories about the hardship or the absurdity or the injustice, and through the act of telling the story, and that being heard and shared, the appeal to something which is hard to put our finger on. But somehow keeping going is its own evidence, its own form of hope, whereas the louder stories of optimism are often people trying to drown out their own lack of hope.
+There's a guy who has written a couple of extraordinary books about improvisation that have influenced me a lot, Keith Johnstone, and I got fascinated by improvisation for a whole load of reasons, but not least because it literally means the absence of foresight. Improvisation is the art of living without being able to see what is coming next. It takes improvidence, which is the great vice of capitalism, and inverts it, makes it into a virtue: I'm going to get //good// at being improvident and develop the skills for being OK with not knowing what's coming next, with not having been able to prepare for the future, because the future is always going to come and surprise us and make fools of us. At a certain point, Johnstone says, 'When you're improvising a story, you shouldn't worry about what's coming next. You should be like someone walking backwards, looking for the moment where you can weave something back in from earlier on.' And that moment is always the moment where you as a storyteller or a comedian or whatever and the audience have the best experience in telling of a story. I think that's because meaning has something to do with the coming into alignment of the cyclical and the linear. And we get the sensation of that coming into alignment when, suddenly, something from what we were talking about an hour ago connects back into what we're talking about now, and it feels like the past isn't irrelevant, the past isn't lost.