Finding Our Way Home: A Reading List
My mum left school at sixteen. When she was about the age that I am now, she went to university as a mature student. When she talks about this, sometimes she’ll say, ‘I went to get a reading list for the rest of my life.’
The list of suggested reading that I’ve been drawing together for Finding Our Way Home is a little humbler in its aspirations — but I’d certainly encourage our scholars to approach it as a list which will accompany them after the course, as much as in their preparations over the next five weeks.
Whatever else, it shouldn’t feel like homework. If you skim this list and find one or two things that speak to you, that’s more than enough preparation.
Also, I should underline, the theoretical language of some of the texts isn’t going to be the way we talk about things during the course — so don’t be put off if some of these texts are really not your kind of thing. There are plenty of different paths which converge on the common ground where I hope we can meet. (And since a reading list is by its nature bookish, I should say, that includes practical and sensual and experiential paths that aren’t so obvious from a post like this.)
So — whether you’re joining us for this first course or following what we’re up to from afar — the invitation is to trust your sense of smell, have a sniff around at some of the paths suggested here, then follow one or two and see where that leads you.
One more thing: I’ve split the list into two halves, corresponding roughly to the opening and closing parts of the week. In between, we’ll spend a good part of our time exploring the territory of ‘Total Work’ which our guest teacher Andrew Taggart has been investigating — so he’ll be following up with a post of his own, suggesting some ways into that theme. Look out for that within the next few days.
Getting Our Bearings
We framed this course with a question: ‘What if the culture you grew up in was broken in ways that you didn’t even have words for?’
The readings that make up the first half of my list are intended as clues to that question, vantage points from which we might catch a glimpse of what our culture — our way of living, being in and making sense of the world — looks like from outside. How do we become aware of our unacknowledged assumptions, the stories we grew up taking for reality itself? What do we do with that awareness when it comes?
A book which can serve as a starting point is Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World. It’s a fascinating set of intertwining stories, told around the matsutake mushroom and all those (humans and non-humans) whose lives are connected around it. I’m starting here because of one of the early chapters, where she writes about some of those unacknowledged assumptions:
most of us were raised on visions of modernization and progress … I imagine you talking back: “Progress? That’s an idea from the nineteenth century.” The term “progress”, referring to a general state, has become rare; even twentieth-century modernization has begun to feel archaic. But their categories and assumptions of improvement are with us everywhere. We imagine their objects every day: democracy, growth, science, hope. Why would we expect economies to grow and sciences to advance? Even without explicit reference to development, our theories of history are embroiled in these categories. So, too, are our personal dreams. I’ll admit it’s hard for me to even say this: there might not be a collective happy ending. Then why bother getting up in the morning?
Something I appreciate about Tsing is that she doesn’t frame this as a polemic against progress — she owns the difficulty of trying to extricate herself from this way of thinking, the fear of what will be left if she does so. I sometimes say that the underlying question I’m trying to work with is: ‘How do we disentangle our thinking and our hopes from the cultural logic of progress?’ Not only does Tsing do a great job of framing this question, she also offers clues as to what the assumptions of progress might be obscuring:
Progress is a forward march, drawing other kinds of time into its rhythms. Without that driving beat, we might notice other temporal patterns. Each living thing remakes the world through seasonal pulses of growth, lifetime reproductive patterns, and geographies of expansion … The curiosity I advocate follows such multiple temporalities, revitalizing description and imagination.
To take such lines of thought seriously is to be invited into a deeper questioning of the roots of the mess the world is in. Another place where such a questioning is being formulated is the website, Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures. This is the work of an international collective of artists, educators and scholars searching for new maps and new ways of mapping the world, beyond the dead ends of the colonial imagination. I discovered their work a few weeks ago (thanks to Vanessa Andreotti, one of the members) and this passage from their introductory statement sums up a great deal in a couple of sentences:
This work proposes a form of analysis that does not trace the roots of contemporary crises to the collapse of a post-War state-capital compromise, to growing inequalities, or to looming climate disaster. These are very real concerns, with very real psychic and material impacts, but they are ultimately symptoms of the same underlying illness: a global modern/colonial imaginary in which being is reduced to knowing, profits take precedent over people, the earth is treated as a resource rather than a living relation, and all of the shiny promises of states, markets, and Western reason are subsidized by the disavowed harms of impoverishment, genocide, and environmental destruction.
I want to add a couple of other texts — from people working in academia, but writing for a wider audience — which suggest the scale of the rethinking that’s called for. First, an essay by David Graeber and David Wengrow, How to change the course of human history (at least, the part that’s already happened). Their focus is on the conventional story of the origins of human social inequality — and the way recent archaeological and anthropological evidence calls into question a whole set of things that are mostly taken for granted about the history of our species. As they write:
Human history becomes a far more interesting place, containing many more hopeful moments than we’ve been led to imagine, once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles …
Alongside that, I’d introduce the work of James C. Scott, which will come up at various points in the week. His latest book, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, is shaped by the same collision between archaeological research and conventional narratives about human history to which Graeber and Wengrow are pointing. Here he summarises those narratives which are now being called into question by the evidence:
Though they vary in the details, such accounts record the march of civilization conveyed by most pedagogical routines and imprinted on the brains of schoolgirls and schoolboys throughout the world. The move from one mode of subsistence to the next is seen as sharp and definitive. No one, once shown the techniques of agriculture, would dream of remaining a nomad or a forager. Each step is presumed to represent an epoch-making leap in mankind’s well-being: more leisure, better nutrition, longer life expectancy, and, at long last, a settled life that promoted the household arts and the development of civilization. Dislodging this narrative from the world’s imagination is well nigh impossible; the twelve-step recovery program required to accomplish that beggars the imagination.
Underpinned by a wealth of scholarly work, I find these texts a great help — but once we cross into the territory of ‘the world’s imagination’ and the need for something like a ‘twelve-step recovery program’, I’d suggest that we’re off the edge of the kind of maps that can be drawn with the tools of academia.
Since Scott invokes the work of Alcoholics Anonymous, let me drop in a short essay from 1975 by Lewis Hyde, Alcohol & Poetry: John Berryman and the Booze Talking. You don’t have to be familiar with Berryman’s poetry to get plenty out of Hyde’s essay, which builds on his own experience as a counsellor for alcoholics on the detox ward of a city hospital. This is actually the text that led me to the thought that what we are living in might well be named a broken culture. Hyde writes:
A culture faces and interprets pain, deviance and death. It endows them with meaning; it illuminates how they are a part of the whole and thereby makes them tolerable … The widespread use of alcohol and other central nervous system anaesthetics is directly linked to a decline in culture. The wider their use, the harder it becomes to preserve, renew and invigorate the wisdom that a culture should hold. This doubles back and escalates. Alcoholism spreads when a culture is dying, just as rickets appears when there is no Vitamin D.
Two more books to close this section, each of which deals in the kind of cultural wisdom towards which Hyde is gesturing.
Firstly, Stephen Jenkinson’s Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul, a book about how to live and die well in ‘a death-phobic society’. Jenkinson’s work is grounded in twenty years as a counsellor with the dying — and his book is woven with beauty and meaning. (If you’ve more room for listening than reading in your life just now, then there’s a collection of interviews with Stephen on his Soundcloud page.)
And finally, if we’re talking about ‘the world’s imagination’, I don’t know anyone who is a better guide into that territory than Martin Shaw, storyteller, mythographer and a good friend to this school. Start with either of his first two books — A Branch from the Lightning Tree or Snowy Tower. Martin’s work links the wildness in land to the ecology of stories and the shapes of a human life. (If you want a taste of this, and some more about why I think it matters, then try the review essay on those two books which I wrote for STIR magazine, An Outlandish Generosity.)
Turning for Home
In the last day or two of our week together, we’ll turn our attention to the places to which we will soon be returning — and what it could mean to regrow a living culture, starting from where we find ourselves.
As a way into this — a rather spiky one, admittedly — I’d invite you to read Ivan Illich’s speech, To Hell With Good Intentions. Given in 1968 to a student-run organisation in the US that was running a ‘voluntary action overseas’ programme, there’s an amazing radio documentary to be made by going around and interviewing those students, fifty years on, about their memories of the occasion and what it did (or didn’t do) to shape their lives. At any rate, the organisation itself disbanded within a year or so.
I have to reread that text every so often, because it’s an inoculation against the kinds of self-deception that often surround our attempts to respond to the mess the world is in. People sometimes object that Illich was better at criticism than at making constructive suggestions — but I’ve come across plenty of others whose constructive work is infused with his influence. One example I want to bring in here is the community organiser and researcher John McKnight. His stories and ideas are well represented by this three-part radio series from 1994, Community and its Counterfeits. McKnight is best known as the originator of ‘asset-based community development’: an approach which begins with the recognition that most ‘development’ activities (whether at a neighbourhood or global level) begin by identifying needs, gaps, indices of deprivation —in other words, defining people and places according to what they lack, then to try to change things by mobilising resources from outside on the basis of that definition. The ‘asset-based’ approach begins instead by mapping whatever is already present in the situation, perhaps underestimated or overlooked, and tries to change things by working from here.
McKnight talks about the counterproductivity of many of the professional substitutes for community — and this chimes with an essay by Elizabeth Slade, written for the special issue of Dark Mountain which I co-edited last year. She writes as an atheist with a background in science communication and healthcare research who has become fascinated by churches and the gap which a decline in religious participation has created in our societies. You can read the whole essay, The God-Shaped Hole, in the SANCTUM issue of Dark Mountain (that link goes to the PDF, the book is now out of print) — or there’s an extract from it, together with a conversation between the two of us, published online as Believing in Holidays.
If there’s one piece of my own that I’d put on this list, it’s Childish Things, the essay I wrote for that same book. You could say it’s about the overlap between the roles that have sometimes gone under the names of ‘religion’ and ‘art’. When we call HOME ‘a school for culturemakers’, we use that weird, made-up word because it has room for a lot more people than a word like ‘artist’ and because it carries less baggage. Ultimately, I’d argue, the making of culture is the common activity of being human together — just as Ellen Dissanayake points out that, in most human cultures, it has been the norm for just about everyone to be a participant in and appreciator of what we’d call artistic activity.
In the essay, I discuss the exceptional figure of the artist in modern societies as a professional maker of culture. This sense of exceptionality allowed the arts to provide a refuge for the parts of human experience which elude measurement — but, I argue:
In the world we are headed into, it won’t be enough for an artist caste to be the custodians, the ones who help us see the world in terms that slip the net of measurable utility and exchange.
Instead, the essay ends with a vision of the common work of culturemaking, from the perspective of those willing to walk away from the precarious privilege of artistic status:
Unable to appeal to the authority of art, you begin again, with whatever skills you have gathered along the way and whatever help you can find. You do what it takes to make work that has a chance of coming alive in the spaces where we meet, to build those spaces in such a way that it is safe to bring more of ourselves.
Since we’re in the territory that sometimes goes under the name of art, I want to stretch the definition of a reading list and introduce you to three artists whose work might feed into our conversations.
Lottie Child created Street Training because she realised that she was feeling unsafe on the streets of the neighbourhood to which she’d recently moved. So she spent twenty-four hours walking around London, asking everyone she met two questions: ‘What should I do to be safe on the street?’ and ‘What should I do to have fun on the street?’ Almost everyone had advice about how to be safe, she says — often along the lines of ‘You shouldn’t be out on your own around here at this time of night’ — but the only people with advice about how to have fun were children and teenagers. So she decided to apprentice herself to children and teenagers, getting them to teach her how to act in the street. At one stage, having spent a year working with young people on the Sceaux Gardens estate in south London, she got them running a workshop to train local police in how to tell the difference between creative behaviour and antisocial behaviour. Here’s a video about Street Training.
Mierle Laderman Ukeles wrote a four-page text, the Manifesto for Maintenance Art, in 1969 and has spent five decades putting it into practice. Its starting point was the transformation of her life when she became a mother:
I am an artist. I am a woman. I am a wife. I am a mother. (Random order). I do a hell of a lot of washing, cleaning, cooking, renewing, supporting, preserving, etc. Also, (up to now separately) I “do” Art. Now, I will simply do these maintenance everyday things, and flush them up to consciousness, exhibit them, as Art.
Pulling on this thread of maintenance led from the personal to the systemic. In a performance at the Wadsworth Atheneum, she cleaned the glass case of the Egyptian mummy — and by declaring the act of cleaning a work of art, transferred the responsibility for this ongoing task of maintenance from the (low status) cleaning staff to the (high status) conservation staff. In 1977, she invited herself to become artist-in-residence at the New York City Sanitation Department — an unpaid role which she holds to this day — and in her Touch Sanitation project, she spent eleven months going around to meet and shake hands with each of the department’s 8,500 refuse collectors, thanking them for ‘keeping the city alive’.
The third artist I’m thinking of is Theaster Gates — and rather than retell the story in the linked article, I just want to send you over there to read it. (There’s also this article, which starts with the story of him winning the Artes Mundi prize, yelling ‘Let’s split this motherfucker!’ and sharing the £40,000 prize money with the other nine shortlisted artists.)
It’s a small journey from the things Gates gets up to in the name of art to the work of my friends Ana Džokić and Marc Neelen, who together form the architecture duo STEALTH.unlimited, and I want to mention their book Upscaling, Training, Commoning. (That link takes you to the print edition — or you can download a PDF of an early version of the book.) It’s the document of ten years of their work and the things that have inspired them as they search for different ways that people can own, build and use spaces in cities.
Finally, I have two books from people who work with theatre — very different books, but each of them has become a touchstone for me.
First, Keith Johnstone’s Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre. Johnstone invented much of modern comedy improvisation while working as a secondary school teacher and trying to recover from the damage his own schooling had done to him. The introductory chapter is a powerful essay about education. While there are plenty of practical exercises in his books, what shines through Johnstone’s writing is that he doesn’t see improvisation as a specialist performance skill, but as a practice of being human together. He’s also famous for telling performers things like ‘Stop trying’ and ‘Don’t do your best’ — the latter is the title of his recent TED talk (perhaps better described as his demolition of the TED format).
Last on the list, The Forest and the Field: Changing theatre in a changing world by the British theatremaker Chris Goode is dense with ideas and references, the kind of book that took me months to get through, but that’s full of passages to which I keep returning. One thing I love about thinkers who are also theatremakers is that they write like they have bodies as well as minds. Right at the end of the book, there’s a passage that gives one vision of a living culture:
What if going to theatre meant going there, to that house down the road? Paying a couple of quid to cover the costs, or taking flowers, and being prepared for there to be hardly any difference between doing and watching? It might sound nice — or it might sound to you like an unconscionable nightmare. How, then, would you change it? What would be on offer if people came round to your place instead? Or what if, instead of changing your neighbour’s event, you changed your mind about what you might want from an evening out?
And how, in the end, how on earth do we get from the changing of a mind in relation to some mild shenanigans three doors down, to changing the world? Well, how else: firstly, by adapting the events we make and the events we attend until they start to really change us, really change our week, our rhythms, our daydreams in the bath, our family outings, our fights with our lovers, the feel of our bodies when we get dressed in the mornings, what we think about time, what we think about voting, how we feel when someone asks us for money in the street. We make those events help to make that change. And then secondly, we make sure that, once a fortnight at least, there’s someone on every street who’s making their kitchen or their garage or the bit of common ground in front of their estate into a theatre for the evening. We make sure that everyone knows someone who does that, or who goes, and who swears by it. We let the relief show in our faces. We organise things so that the kids can play out more. We introduce theatre-making people on every street to the people on the next street who are doing the same things, or really different things, and we share what we’re finding out …
And these front-room and bedroom and up-on-the-roof theatres become a network; then a mesh; then a fabric …
It doesn’t have to be all about theatre, but there’s something here that speaks to me about what a living, close-to-the-ground culture looks like. (And then I stumble across something like Playing Out — the network of residents closing their streets to cars so that children can play out more — and I’m reminded that pieces of this culture are already spreading.)
All right, that’s probably enough to be going on with.
Once more, this collage of books and essays and podcasts and artworks isn’t meant to be a set of gospel texts or flawless examples — rather, it’s a set of clues, gestures in directions some of which might turn out to be helpful.
Five weeks and five days from now, the route we’ve taken together through the course will probably look quite different. It will be shaped by the group of scholars who are taking that journey together.
In the meantime, enjoy sniffing around these trails, and I hope you pick up some leads that turn out to be helpful.
