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--- resilients:dougald_hine_interview [2013-01-16 18:33] – 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. 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.
-Interviewer: What connects all of these different projects, in your view?
+**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.
+**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...?