Adios!

In less than twelve hours time, I will be on my way to Mexico! I don't know how much internet access I'll have - or want to have - over the next week. But I'm sure I'll report back on the gathering in Cuernavaca before long.

The Peter Pan Guide to Turning Thirty

All week, people have been asking me how it feels to be 30. My first answer was, "Much the same as 29, only it's a bit harder for people to patronise you on account of your youth!" (As James Wallbank pointed out, though, it's easier for them to say, "At your age, you really should have grown out of...")

Then I started to notice the difference. Perhaps it's all the other things going on around my life, but there's a sharpened sense that this is it: I'm never going to be a grown up, so it's time to get serious! (Or, as Andy put it to me, "We've avoided growing up for long enough, and now the rules have changed!")

With this, I was reminded of a passage from John Berger, which is ostensibly about the relationship between a painter and his subject, but which catches something larger about what might be called vocation:

How did you become what you visibly are? asks the painter.

I am as I am. I'm waiting, replies the mountain or the mouse or the child.

What for?

For you, if you abandon everything else.

For how long?

For as long as it takes.

There are other things in life.

Find them and be more normal.

And if I don't

I'll give you what I've given nobody else, but it's worthless, it's simply the answer to your useless question.

Useless?

I am as I am.

No promise more than that?

None. I can wait for ever.

I'd like a normal life.

Live it and don't count on me.

And if I do count on you?

Forget everything and in me you'll find -- me!

The collaboration which sometimes follows is seldom based on good will: more usually on desire, rage, fear, pity or longing. The modern illusion concerning painting (which post-modernism has done nothing to correct) is that the artist is a creator. Rather he is a receiver. What seems like creation is the act of giving form to what he has received.

John Berger, Steps Towards A Small Theory Of The Visible

(I'll be back in a day or two, when I have more time, to take up some of the threads from people's responses to recent posts. For now, though, thanks for turning my monologue into a conversation! It's far more sociable that way.)

To be AND not to be

As words must be learned by listening and by painful attempts at imitation of a native speaker, so silences must be acquired through a delicate openness to them. Silence has its pauses and hesitations, its rhythms and expressions and inflections; its durations and pitches, and times to be and not to be.

The last phrase of that passage, from Illich's reflection on 'The Eloquence of Silence', makes me sit bolt upright whenever I reach it. Let me try to explain.

'To be, or not to be?' That is the question with which we are familiar. The figure of Hamlet, like that of his creator, stands at the back of what (in the long sense) is called modern English literature. 'Modernity' is a slippery concept, but there is a certain peculiar way of thinking about the world which became dominant among the powerful and 'forward-thinking' in western Europe from the 17th century onwards.

One of the peculiarities of this way of thinking is a tendency to insist on 'either/or' answers. (Anthony - who would probably steer me away from historical narrative here - talks about 'the elimination of uncertainty' as a key characteristic of the 'dynamics of enclosure' which he critiques.) This 'either/or' tendency is itself a characteristic of a desire for once-and-for-all solutions.

One of the things which is lost, as this way of thinking becomes dominant, is the sense of timeliness. The assumption that different, seemingly opposite, things may be right at different moments gives way, for example, to the attempt to identify timeless, universal Rights. (Paradoxically, the superiority of these tends to be bound up with the non-timeless assumption that the present is necessarily superior in wisdom to the past. This, however, is a very different kind of time to that experienced by those immersed in the sense of timeliness.)

Much of this is sensed in Shakespeare, anticipated and handled with careful ambiguity. (Hamlet himself observes that 'the times are out of joint'.) Harold Bloom made the bold claim that Shakespeare 'invented the human as we know it'. In a different key, it might be said that Hamlet seems the prototype of the modern individual, the subject who feels obliged to contain a universe within his self - to reach 'either/or' answers.

So, when Illich ends his list of the properties of silence with its 'times to be and not to be', I hear an echo arcing back over the centuries, or outwards from those centres of power where Hamlet-like leaders strut and fret, to the vernacular world in which Illich was at home. In Shakespeare's England, this world was still close enough at hand to feed in and out of his writing - soon afterwards, the gap between the vernacular understandings of reality and those common among the intellectual, political and literary elites would extend to a point where, finally, high culture could rediscover 'the folk' as (more often than not) an exotic object of fascination and condescension.

The Gospel According to Lego

Genesis 2v19-20: "He brought them to the man to see what he would call them. Whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all the cattle, every bird of the sky, and every animal of the field. But no suitable helper was found for the man."

My sister, for her sins, is an RE teacher. (That's Religious Education, a subject all schools in the UK are obliged to teach.) Her attempts to keep her pupils' attention brought to my attention the revelation that is The Brick Testament.

The section on St Paul's Instructions on Marriage is particularly... instructive, shall we say. Though possibly not suitable for school. (Or church, for that matter.)

Gettin' On Planes

Rather like Mr T, I have an aversion to getting on planes. Not an actual phobia, although I never much enjoyed the experience: all the boredom of a childhood car journey, sandwiched between two halves of a rollercoaster ride...

But eighteen months ago, I decided to give up flying - more or less. As you've doubtless heard a million times, as an ordinary citizen, not flying is pretty much the biggest difference you can make to your carbon footprint. (And don't get me started on carbon offsetting...)

I say "more or less". I realised a while ago that it would be hard to get through the process of setting up the School of Everything without taking some flights for work purposes. It's not exactly taking EasyJet to Prague for a boozy weekend, but I'm not comfortable with the amount of "necessary" flying required for business-as-usual - whether in business or academia.

But then today, for the first time since I quit, I found myself really feeling the need to fly somewhere. What's responsible for my fall from the wagon? This:

Ivan Illich passed away in December 2002. Five years after his death, a group of friends and readers are convoking other friends and readers around the world to meet in Cuernavaca. There, more than thirty years ago, thanks to the fruitful milieu provided by the Centro Intercultural de Documantación (CIDOC) headed by Valentina Borremans, he launched a critical debate on the major institutions of industrial society and the underlying public certainties supporting them... We want to call friends and readers of Ivan to gather on Mexican soil, the country where he lived so long.

The gathering is only ten days away. I have just written to the organisers, to check that it will be possible to take part. Assuming it is, and assuming I can find a way to pay for the flight, I'll be there.

P2P Breakfast

To Islington, this morning, for a Hub Breakfast with Michel Bauwens of the Foundation for P2P Alternatives. He's a very impressive guy, from a high-level corporate background (but with a Marxist heart beating somewhere in there), who's both drawing together information on the range of peer-to-peer projects in different fields and attempting to create a narrative of how P2P production could displace capitalism-as-we-know-it.

He's very alert to the potential critiques of this - in particular, the difference between P2P knowledge production and applying the same approach to production of material goods. My favourite soundbite was this: "Today, we act as if material resources were infinite and immaterial resources [i.e. music, writing, software] were finite, when really it's the other way round!" (Easy to say, hard to change, of course.)

As I said to him afterwards, for someone who likens the movement he's involved in to 19th century socialism, he seems very optimistic. (He replied, reasonably enough, that the labour movement did much to improve the quality of life - and he's not a utopian.)

What did strike me was a certain slippage which is, perhaps, inevitable when offering narratives of successive economic eras. Just as capitalism replaced feudalism, Michel said, so P2P production will (possibly) replace capitalism "because it's better". But to what kind of "good" does this "better" refer? Economic or ethical? In fact, this kind of narrative tends to collapse the distinction. But surely we can imagine a situation in which one way of living is economically better, while ethically worse?

When challenged on his optimism, Michel said that, of course, it is possible the human race will commit collective suicide, but it seems unlikely that people will choose to do so if there are other options available. If I am (relatively speaking) a pessimist, it is because of a suspicion that our demise may come about, not as an act of suicide, but as the kind of unintended overdose to which addicts are prone.

(I'm actually a rather hopeful kind of pessimist, but I don't place my hope in narratives of progress.)

The Philosophy of "As If"

Having been an enthusiastic participant in the Yahoo! Groups Alan Garner list for several years, I was delighted to discover that a similar list existed, dedicated to the work of Ivan Illich. It looks to have become rather quiet, but I'm enjoying working my way through the archives, with the intention of introducing myself and (assuming the locals are friendly!) inviting along some of the people I've met in the past year who've expressed an interest in developing a conversation about Illich's ideas and influence.

Anyway, in the context of a discussion about the roles of the individual and the state in social change, I came across this great paragraph:

I have been wrestling for a long time with context vs individual responsibility. I have concluded it is not either-or, but both that matter. Yes, of course, we must each take personal responsibility for our own situations. We must pull a Vaihinger "as-if". The only alternative is madness and depression and curling up into little shivering balls of protoplasm. At the very same time, holding two contradictory ideas all at once, context is all. Sort of a C. Wright Mills sociological imagination riff. Context is all, yet we must act as if we are in total control of everything. So, we must together work to change context, work to make the world better for all, work to drag a kicking and screaming bad tempered world together into the commons of the god of all. At the same time we must, at the individual level, work with each person and ourselves to take individual control of as much of our lives as we can grab and self-direct within the context in which we exist.

The poster's name is Dan, and what he says reminds me of conversations I've had with a different Dan. I wasn't familiar with Hans Vaihinger, the philosopher mentioned, but the importance of "as if" resonates strongly with my own experience and the approach to reality to which it has led me.

Returning...

I hadn't planned to take a break from this blog, but one week stretched into another until I found I had stepped back from it (which was no bad thing). It has been a busy time! All kinds of things came to a head at once, as if to meet the deadline of my 30th birthday. Well, the day is upon me, and it seems a happy moment to return.

My main news is that I now have a place to live in London, after spending much of the past year living on Paul's sofa. I've been lucky to have such a tolerant business partner, but it is a huge relief to have a real bed - and to be reunited with my books! (And I'm sure the only person who's more relieved than me is Paul...) In practice, I will be spending about the same amount of my time in London (around 80% of it) as I have been doing for the past few months. But it will be good to have somewhere for Hannah to stay, so that she can visit me some weekends, instead of me returning to Sheffield.

Meanwhile, things have been moving fast in other areas of my life - including the School of Everything, where much is happening behind the scenes. (More news soon, in other words.) Through that, and through generally following my nose, I have met some amazing people recently. And, as I cross the threshold of this new decade, I'm feeling very lucky with my life.

So, this blog. Time out gave me the chance to pay attention to those blogs I read and enjoy, to think about what I've learned from them and from the experience of keeping my own. Writing matters to me: along with reading, spending time with people I care about, and growing stuff, it is one of the things I intend to do with myself for as long as I have any say in the matter. And for the immediate future, what writing time I get will continue to go into this blog.

My plan right now is to vary the rhythm a bit, to post more often, to be more active in directing people towards things that have caught my attention, and to let go of the habit of needing to turn every thought into an essay! Any other suggestions are very welcome.

I'll also be making an occasional radio programme for Sheffield Live, which is meant to be an extension of this blog. Hopefully it will be a chance to go deeper into those preoccupations which keep surfacing here, but fit awkwardly in the limits of a few paragraphs. It should also be a bit of fun.

The plan is for each programme to take a different question which I've been asked and use it as an excuse to talk to some interesting people. I'm starting with the question that gave this blog its name, asked years ago by a relative: "Isn't it time you got a proper job...?"

(Again, suggestions for other questions I should tackle would be great!)

In Defence of Sweeping Statements & Anecdotal Evidence

Still thinking about Berger, I came across an interesting post from a reader who has just discovered him. Kevin Breathnach writes:

John Berger writes beautifully. Of that, there is no doubting. But he writes out of fashion, form and age. These are not essays like any I'm familiar with. At their worst, they resemble the writings of a class-conscious mind-body-spirit author; at their best, they are the work of the what Berger himself, referring to Giorgio Bassani, names the half-poet, half-historian. But poets are granted an artistic license we would not want within our historians grasp. Hold Everything Dear brims with sweeping statements and anecdotal evidence.

I responded in his comments thread, at slightly greater length than seems polite. But since I haven't had time to post anything here for a couple of days, I thought I'd reproduce my response here.

First, a quote from Mike Dibb's account of his collaboration with Berger (on a famous 1970s TV series):

Although Ways of Seeing may appear to be a succession of statements, these statements are really questions. When John speaks in conversation his sentences often end with an interrogative. "No?" he says, inviting a response, not automatic assent.

The same, I think, applies to those sweeping statements Kevin refers to. They are not made (as is conventional) from an assumed position of universal authority. (The convention of hedging one's statements in cautious terms is not a relinquishing of such authority, but a polite way of retaining it.) Rather, Berger is constantly aware of his thinking and writing as a work in progress, made from a specific, physical location, and based on what can be seen from there. (In the case of 'Hold Everything Dear', several of the essays were written from occupied Palestine and this shapes them.)

How is this different to the most strident sort of universalism? Only (I think) in that the statements truly are intended as questions. Other, contradictory statements may be made from elsewhere - and the assumption is that this should lead to a conversation, rather than a conflict over who is right. (Clearly, in the one-way medium of a book, this must be taken on trust - though accounts of his many collaborations appear to bear it out.)

Secondly, concerning the reliance on "anecdotal evidence", this is not a weakness but fundamental to his method. Berger's writing returns again and again to the theme of "incommensurability" - the claim that things cannot be measured satisfactorily against each other, except in certain limited domains, without losing what matters. The inadmissibility of "anecdotal evidence" is a tenet of a worldview in which everything that matters is capable of being reduced to statistical representation (in terms of money, or in terms of SI units) - a worldview whose limitations he seeks to challenge. But if we baulk at this, it may at least be entered in his defence that he describes himself first and foremost as a storyteller.

The first episode of that TV series ended with Berger addressing his audience: "Consider what I say," he told them, "but be sceptical..."

Stilted Conversations

The event was a screening of Pasolini's 'La Rabbia', but the lights above the entrance to the Curzon cinema spelt out the main attraction: JOHN BERGER IN CONVERSATION. Inside the foyer, the weight of expectation was uncomfortable. For many of us, this was a rare - perhaps a once-only - chance to be in the same room as someone whose life and work had mattered to us deeply. In such situations, the asymmetry between reader and writer always reminds me of a teenage crush.

He looked uncomfortable, too - escorted by the organisers, seated on a stage, enduring our applause. There are writers who seem to relish these occasions, the literary festival or the staged conversation, as if it is payment in fame for the loneliness of their trade. These are not, generally, my kind of writer.

And yet he looked very much himself. Unimpressed with the sound of his own voice, answering slowly as if all his thoughts were work in progress rather than polished objects, and politely declining to answer where he felt he had nothing to add, which was often. It was good to hear him speak. Yet there was little flow to the conversation, the questions or comments from the audience, the host's rephrasing and Berger's response or lack of it. There seemed on many sides a desire for something more or other.

His most animated response was to a questioner who wanted the film to have been more explicitly a call to action (of a dogmatically socialist sort?). His response was to defend the room for imagination and less explicitly political work, yet there was a greater sense of a shared energy between him and the questioner than when others asked about Pasolini's technique or the film's place in the history of cinema.

I should mention his voice. It was not a surprise to me, because I have heard or watched a number of interviews with him, but it is still strange. After thirty-some years in France, he no longer speaks like an Englishman, but with foreign cadences. (He says that nearly all the contemporary poetry which has mattered to him he has read in translation. Now, at this end of a long life, he speaks his native language as if translating himself.)

The other extraordinary thing is his age. There is no way that anyone who didn't know would guess that he is eighty. Physically, he could be twenty years younger, and even then his vigour would be remarkable. (Having been with my elderly grandmother a few days earlier, I struggle to reconcile the fact that they were born in the same year.)

It was a strange evening, too short, but lengthening it would not have helped much. How would I organise it differently? A different venue, for a start, and a different format - one in which the fact that we were gathered around this man and his work was acknowledged, but also the possibility that this shared focus meant we had much to learn from each other. I am sure there were many people present who I would have gained from meeting. What if we had been gathered into smaller groups, to talk with each other, with John joining each group for a while, then moving on to the next?

That's only a thought. There was another meeting the next night, organised by the Institute for Race Relations and held at the London School of Economics. Perhaps it came closer to my idea of how a writer like Berger could be "in conversation" with his readers. I don't know, because the organisers informed me that they had run out of places - and, on the night, I wasn't feeling up to gatecrashing.

Has anyone else had the same experience of the awkwardness of these kind of events? Is it inevitable? Is there, I wonder, something unhealthy about the intensity of the relationship some of us develop with a writer like Berger? Have you been at events which worked better? Or am I being unrealistic? Let me know.

(Berger's essay on La Rabbia is published in Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance. A version of it is available online here.)

I'm very excited!

Tonight I'm going to see John Berger speaking at a cinema in London. The event is a screening of Pasolini's La Rabbia, a little-known film which was the subject of one of Berger's most recent essays.

Regular readers will know that Berger's writing has had a great influence on my life and ideas. This will be the first time I have seen him speak in person - three years ago he was due to address a conference that I was at, but had to cancel (and sent Simon McBurney of Theatre de Complicité in his place).

Further excitement, if that were needed, comes with the rumour of a new Berger novel, From A to X. I can't find much information about the book and its publication schedule, but it is only a few months since his most recent essay collection came out.

I hope that I'm still that active, creative and engaged when I'm eighty!

School of Everything Goes Live!

When a new school opens in the UK, it's customary for a member of the royal family to cut a ribbon or unveil a plaque.

Adam asked me the other day if we had something similar planned for the opening of the School of Everything. I said it would probably be less an opening, more a case of leaving the door unlocked and seeing who wanders in...

Well, that's what we did! The site went live some time last Friday afternoon. (I missed the historic moment, as I was driving a van up the M1 at the time.) It's still very early days and there's a lot we need to fix, but it's exciting to see teachers starting to add themselves to the site.

So go and check it out, list something that you could teach, pass it on to your friends - and let us know what you think!

www.schoolofeverything.com