| **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. | **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. |
nik