If you are a person, the pages written for you are at jerroldmcgrath.com/people. Back to Form 1
JERROLD McGRATH: THE RECORD
6. Books, continued (part 4 of 4)
In Praise of Disorder, chapters 9 and 10; Poetics of Synthetic Language. Continued from part 3.
In Praise of Disorder, full text (continued)
9. Beat the Bounds
Living things are those which resist entropy. They possess a boundary of some kind, a membrane or skin; a metabolism; the ability to react to the world. And to make copies. To pass something on.
— Hari Kunzru, White Tears
The push to move our work and our lives online has accelerated greatly under COVID-19. This trend affects artists and cultural producers just as easily as downtown storefronts or restaurants. Governments have offered incentives to adapt to this changing world. For cultural producers, this means funding and resources to bring real-world practices into digital formats. Our cultural habits are increasingly mediated by screens and consumed digitally. Most of the tools and approaches available to support these transitions have assumed, either implicitly or explicitly, artistic and cultural practices that are commercial- ly oriented and often derived from Western tastes and traditions. This is fine if you work in this way, but diverse cultures produce diverse forms of cultural expression. Unfortunately, too many run the risk of being left behind.
As we saw with autonomous vehicles and black faces, the designers of platforms are blinkered by the experiences with which they are already familiar. Platforms are then developed based on the expectations that have informed their design. So, from a commercial perspective, music is one discipline, paint- ing another, and theatre another still. These disciplines will overlap at times, but platforms are set up as if these categories are discrete. We stream music through services such as Apple Music or Spotify. Visual art can be found for sale through various auction sites such as Fine Art America or through gallery pages. We record theatre in audio and video and watch it as we might a movie.
What happens when cultural traditions fail to align with these boundaries?
Taiko is a form of Japanese drumming and if you attend a live taiko perfor- mance, the first thing you will notice is how it feels physically. Taiko is expe- rienced in the chest and in the body. Your full self shakes in sympathy with the music. The drummers are choreographed and dance from drum to drum, telling a story through them. Where does taiko fit? Would you stream taiko through Spotify? Would watching it on a screen reflect the vibrations the body experiences in performance?
In 2019, my colleagues and I at UKAI Projects worked with a Toronto-based taiko ensemble to explore how the art form might translate to digital environ- ments. Creative technologists worked alongside the taiko group and eventually developed a haptic feedback suit to be worn over your clothes and through which you can feel the drum in your body. This was a quick and low-fidelity prototype, but it suggested that others might benefit from the process.
In 2020, we invited another ten organizations working in culturally specific forms to consider how they might migrate the specificities of their cultur- al traditions to digital production and workflows in ways that celebrate the contemporary nature of their practices. South Asian dance, African American oral histories, Spanish flamenco, Filipino-Canadian youth, Sufi traditions from Central Asia, and others came together and worked with a community of twenty-seven creative technologists to develop prototypes to reimagine their practice for a digital world. Islamic calligraphy in virtual reality environments, motion-based storytelling through Bharatanatyam (a form of classical Indian dance), and an online community space modelled on Baptist church gatherings all emerged from the process.
The residency was called Migration and it surfaced the critical need to acknowledge and respond to technical changes while actively preserving tradi- tions that might be lost in our emphasis on scale. We looked to prioritize those experiencing the greatest risk of exclusion when technology becomes the only source of connection.
This chapter is about beating the bounds, a process of refusal, and is the fi- nal of the four activities that I believe contribute to cultivating a practice of dis- order. The expression beating the bounds has a specific derivation and involves the ceremonial and ritualistic affirmation of traditional boundaries, often by the young and the old, who strike local landmarks with branches as they make a slow circuit of a property or region. The practice predates the Norman conquest of England and may have been borrowed from Roman tradition. Refusing en- croachment shows up in most societies and is particularly prevalent in cultures where maps are rare. Practically, it serves to maintain the integrity of divisions and prevent the movement or transgression of boundary markers.
As a collective activity, beating the bounds ensures that the memory of the limits of a territory are retained while bringing people together in a shared act of belonging and active participation in defining community. Digital or real, physical or symbolic, many of our boundaries are being redrawn, and the practice of beating the bounds, revived in various forms, is one way we may conserve the maps of the physical and symbolic territories that are threatened with erasure.
Each of our four practices are concerned with the categories we use to filter our experiences of the world while building the capacity to experience awe and wonder and to thrive in ambiguity. Lingering allows for distinctions, fragmen- tation, and habitual responses to fade and for us to step into something new.
Interrupting allows for novel and unofficial categories to complicate those that have become stagnant or of limited use in public and private life. Ritual- izing and theorizing provide frameworks for generating and drawing on new categories with which to make meaning and pursue new solutions. Beating the bounds is about preserving categories that are threatened and refusing the ambitions of growth and efficiency in critical areas of life.
The Migration residency was an opportunity to inquire into what might be lost through technological change, and to develop strategies to ensure that traditions are preserved now and in the future. Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows mourned the loss of a Japanese aesthetic and a way of seeing the world that was being overwhelmed by Western technologies of brightness and clarity almost a century ago. Automation and artificial intelligence represent another signifi- cant technological shift that squeezes out ways of knowing the world that are not amenable to positivist and mono-epistemic perspectives.
When people can no longer see themselves represented in their culture, it is an immeasurable loss. We either conform to the dominant culture or withdraw our engagement from the broader discourse. Responding to the pandemic, public officials insist that those able to retreat online must do so. What do they find when they arrive? The artists we worked with talked about rituals of grieving, the loss of touch and intimacy, and gestures untranslatable into the digital world. They were faced with a difficult choice: either they could adapt to the options available or remove themselves from the digital exodus that was intended to keep people safe.
In nature, the loss of biodiversity reduces the resilience of natural systems. It also harms communities that sustain themselves from their environment. The lumper potato was an excellent and scalable solution until it was not.
Similarly, approaches that value compassion, autonomy, or beauty will be trans- formed by the logic of growth and efficiency that is at the core of algorithmic systems. The solutions and forms of expression we might draw upon narrow. Future challenges may benefit from these excluded values, but the extinction of practices means we will be less well-equipped to respond. Potlatch and related approaches developed by Pacific Northwest Indigenous communities are re- covering. But this recovery has been slowed considerably by the near complete destruction of the social and institutional frameworks for enabling potlatch.
Ideas of generosity must be combined with the structural and institutional techniques necessary to animate them.
The shift to living our lives online is bolstered by a rhetoric of inevitability.
The idea of the Metaverse being promoted by companies such as Facebook and Disney, perversely drawn from dystopian science fiction, offers new digital worlds to colonize and commodify. The Migration residency was an opportuni- ty to question the values put at the centre of these new digital worlds and insist on the maintenance of ways of knowing that ought to be retained. This is more than a question of what is selected for inclusion or omitted. AI is a procrustean bed, stretching and cutting away at ideas that do not fit its design. Some values will be selected against. Others will be mutilated in their translation to different contexts. In either case, protection becomes essential. The reasons for this are both moral and practical. Responding to hard times requires a diverse pool of approaches upon which to draw.
Pablo Suarez is the associate director of programs for the Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Centre and an advisor for Oxfam America’s Private Sector Team. Among the many organizations he has consulted for around the world are the United Nations Environment Programme, the World Bank, the Interna- tional Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). Pablo and I are both members of the BMW Foundation Responsible Leaders network and we were two of the four co-authors of an article commissioned by the Foundation.
Pablo thinks constantly about risk. He works with unusual collaborators, including experts on machine learning, scientists, artists, and humorists, ex- ploring how we can improve our understanding of and response to large-scale shocks. We spoke about his work and the relationship of order and disorder to risk around climate disasters.
In his experience, profound shocks require that people “be open to the reconfiguration of meaning.” Ideas around hierarchy, reliability, need, and possibility must be reworked if individuals and communities hope to deal with disaster. Pablo also argues that we must be open to the signals that emerge from the system as it’s enduring these shocks and acknowledge that things are no longer what they used to be in terms of their constitutive elements, relation- ships, and emergent properties. When existing structures of meaning collapse, other forms need to be elevated. Where, though, are these new forms drawn from?
Pablo believes that there always will be trade-offs between larger systems and subsystems in a crisis. What may be best for me might be harmful to my household, community, or nation. Cultures and communities have learned to embed these trade-offs into decision-making across boundaries, whether geographic, temporal, or in some other form. As evidence of hoarding and profiteering suggests, crisis can encourage “myopic, selfish, imminent, rapid, certain decision-making over the collective, long-term, and thoughtful.” Collec- tive approaches, refined over time, can limit or offset patterns that exacerbate the crisis.
Complex and local processes of accommodation and response emerge over centuries. Solutions are shaped by the geography and material contexts of specific communities. The Tohoku earthquake in Japan caused a power outage for much of Tokyo. With the trains inoperable, workers in the downtown were forced to walk home, often for hours in the dark. At key intersections, local communities set up care stations that included portable generators to provide short-term charging of cell phones so that commuters could reassure their families that they were safe. These responses were not centrally organized.
They reflected a history of response to disaster and a sense of connection to place that required that those living in that place take care of those passing through it.
Institutionalization and increased investment in establishing and maintain- ing order have reduced these local differences. Vernacular practices are disap- pearing in ways that echo the mass extinction of species and loss of habitat.
As more locations succumb to the needs of growth and efficiency, more local practices cease to be viable or supported. Ukai is a vernacular practice that has survived, though only after it had been translated for tourism.
In Pablo’s opinion, the number of unconventional crises we witness will continue to escalate. He suggests that “there are predictable as well as unfore- seen negative consequences when the off-the-shelf protocols are not suitable for dealing with situations.” Approaches that enable people to feel comforta- ble, connected, and creative in the face of the unknown are required. When we don’t know what is coming, we need a portfolio “of skills, of mindsets, of modalities of noticing and engaging and offering and responding that can lead to the collective construction of something useful.” We need to ensure that this portfolio remains available over the long term, not only for us but for future generations, especially during those times when official ideologies and ap- proaches cease to be effective.
Uniformity and consistency can seem like desirable things, and we benefit greatly from efforts at order. However, Pablo observes that “when things are unfair, order is not necessarily good. This can apply to oppressive regimes or to the location of resources in a city.” Having grown up during a period of dicta- torship in Argentina, Pablo recalls how ideas of order can be leveraged to justi- fy oppression and centralize power. In his work, he has reached the conclusion that it is helpful to question whether order should be considered good. Espe- cially as disorder allows for other potential solutions to rise to our attention.
A crisis demands that we reconsider our habitual approaches, learning from others and trying different things. We need to accept that alternative approaches are possible, and that other people may be better placed to deliver solutions. According to Pablo, “egos must be checked” so that other ways of understanding the situation can come forward. He elaborates: “Very often what happens in situations of shock is the desire to preserve a sense of identity, a sense of self, including unfortunately, a sense of territoriality.”
We continue to defend official categories of action because the law or a figure of authority says we should. Pablo cautions that sometimes the entities traditionally tasked through law or habit for certain functions are no longer the right ones. There is a need to decentralize, allowing for individuals, house- holds, communities, and sectors to draw on their own experiences and local practices in ways that are aligned with the macro. Sicilian neighbours play their tambourines to each other during periods of forced isolation. Haiyan Zhang draws on her experience of makers and designers to give a sense of agency to Japanese mothers concerned about radiation. Fish are plucked from the Nagara River by pitch-black cormorants.
Boundaries and Borders
The elevation of national borders is a relatively recent phenomenon. This is not to suggest that boundaries didn’t matter, just that the types of boundaries that regular people concerned themselves with were more local and immedi- ately felt, sometimes intensely so. The 2,000-year-old remains of Old Croghan Man were found by excavators clearing an Irish bog drain in 2003. Evidence remained that his death had been a particularly violent one. His arms were threaded with bands made of bark to stake his corpse to the peat at the bottom of a pool. He was killed with a stab wound to the chest and then disemboweled and decapitated. The bands of bark used to bind him were thought to have magical properties in Irish tradition. They served to protect boundaries from invading armies, as well as being associated with fertility and the milking of cows. Old Croghan Man was large and strong, built like a modern-day football player. Other evidence suggests he was likely of high status.
The motivation behind this severe treatment remains a mystery, but Ea- monn P. Kelly, keeper of Irish Antiquities at the National Museum of Ireland, believes Old Croghan Man and other similarly treated bodies, were “failed kings or failed candidates for kingship who were killed and placed in bogs that formed important tribal boundaries.” Boundaries have always mattered, though which are preserved, and which are allowed to pass from memory are products of the cultures that select them.
Every existing entity, physical or conceptual, comes into being through boundaries and the maintenance of those boundaries has a long, and occa- sionally, bloody history. Certain categories and divisions take on qualities of the sacred. Others fade or are encroached upon and eliminated. Lines change constantly and are only stable when time is removed from the equation. The lines presently being redrawn or erased require a collective memory and com- mitment to their maintenance if we hope to see them preserved.
Recent discoveries in biology suggest that the immune system, our body’s attempt to preserve the integrity of the organism, evolved not only to keep things out but to let in helpful bacteria that aid in such activities as digestion. Most boundaries are permeable. At the edges of any given pattern there are transitional zones: the bounds. This is where interaction takes place and where the activity of beating the bounds occurs.
We sort the world by drawing lines, real or symbolic. All organization is the transformation of boundary relationships, the translation of wholes into fragments and divisions. Sociologist Robert Cooper argues that action does not take place inside or outside boundaries, but rather all action extends from their application. We define and redefine the actual out of a cloud of potentialities. German philosopher Martin Heidegger believed that organiz- ing or ordering the world is more than functional, but also serves as a form of revealing. The definition and separation of elements of total experience is a primary activity in how we interact with the world. We manufacture the other, difference, causation, and meaning through the lines we draw and allow to be drawn on our behalf.
Each of the four strategies discussed here—lingering, interrupting, ritual- izing and theorizing, and beating the bounds—is concerned with this process of definition and redefinition. The raw material for this activity can come from many sources but, as highlighted by Pablo Suarez, being asked to generate new approaches in a moment of crisis will stretch our ability to respond effectively.
Certain modern boundaries are defended with the zeal associated with Old Croghan Man. The urge to build walls, defend the sanctity of a home, or to insulate the human body from harm draws on this instinct. Others are allowed to disappear or are actively erased. This erasure can be accompanied by violence, but over time we begin to fall into habits and settled beliefs, forgetting how these changes originally came about. The rights of women were earned through conflict and passionate commitment over decades. We take a woman’s right to vote as a given in Canada, but the line that divided the rights of men and women was only shifted through the sacrifice of many.
Twenty years ago, when travelling to another city, the idea of paying a stranger to sleep in their home seemed an unlikely trespass until Airbnb and other companies shifted my sense of what was normal or possible. My last visit to Berlin saw me in a hotel just steps away from the former site of the Berlin Wall, an actual and symbolic divide between competing ideologies. Each day, I crossed the site, utterly unimpeded. Inviting devices into our home that listen to our every word and that then share this information with invisible technol- ogy companies would have been unthinkable to my grandparents. It is com- monplace and unremarkable today. Equipping mothers with handmade Geiger counters was an unlikely solution to the problem of sourcing reliable informa- tion on radiation levels in a community.
When categories are reworked that upend our ways of engaging with the world, we might at first refuse these new divisions and classifications. Over time, we begin to accommodate them, despite feeling some resentment. Ac- cording to philosopher Eugene Gendlin, the longer we inhabit new conceptual categories the more easily we begin to overlook the meaning behind them. Our desire for coherence leads us to confuse the map for the terrain. We assume that the category, the line, the division describes the world when the reality is that it is actively involved in shaping behaviour and ideas and could just as easily be otherwise.
The urge to perceive distinctions is persistent and deeply held. The book of Genesis tells of a God that creates through division: light from darkness, land from water. The drive toward separation brings individual things into being. According to philosopher and psychologist William James, the belief that space and time can be broken down into smaller parts is a product of our “intellectu- alist impulse.” We possess concepts that allow us to abstractly imagine divi- sions of greater refinement, so we transform our perceptions to accommodate these ideas and imagine similar things about the real world must be true.
The benefits of disorder can be realized through ignoring unhelpful bound- aries, by lingering and thereby appreciating other connections and ways of relating. Boundaries can be interrupted, particularly those that have become stubbornly intractable yet no longer serve their original purpose. Replacement becomes possible through rituals and theories that introduce new competitors into the marketplace for ideas. Beating the bounds, however, encourages us to preserve what exists, actively protecting approaches that might otherwise be threatened by the hegemony of scale.
Boundaries on the Land
Old Croghan Man represents the fundamental violence that can be deployed to define boundaries, particularly those that separate different groups of people. Of course, the idea of difference is also the product of the symbolic lines we have created to distinguish our own group from others. Over time, the violence embedded in these practices has been turned over to institutions of state, yet their efforts remain focused on ensuring the sanctity and separation of distinc- tive zones of life.
In much of the world, private property is particularly well marked, with the lines clearly drawn. The boundaries most vigorously protected are those most central to our current conceptions of order. Separations that facilitate the scal- ing of commerce or institutional services are rigidly enforced. Those that serve other values are often ignored or undergo active erasure. A practice of disorder asks us to defend these unpopular boundaries and to ensure that their permea- bility continues to reflect the values from which they are derived.
Daily tous les jours places their musical swings where neighbourhoods meet. They support the re-inhabitation of transitional zones and the blending of different groups. Haiyan’s Geiger counter work was predicated on the belief that the measurement and maintenance of a home or community should, at least in part, be in the hands of those who live there. The English enforced their rights to Irish land and resisted efforts to alter the boundaries so that the suffering of the Irish people could be eased.
Those closest to a place are most sensitive to its subtle demarcations and variations. Contrast the monoculture of potatoes in Ireland with what is found on a typical Andean farm. A high-altitude Andean potato farmer will cultivate over a dozen small parcels, rotating over time. Intimacy with the land and soil means that each smaller division is distinct in terms of exposure to light, wind, sun, and water. Variances in incline and cultivation history also have an effect. Scale, though, demands detachment and the omission of contextual qualities. Boundaries teased from experience or vernacular needs are invisible from such a conceptual distance.
While working at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, I occasionally had the opportunity to ask Indigenous Elders about the mountainous land on which we worked. I was curious about its history and to whom it belonged.
One Elder chided me for asking the wrong questions. The land was used by different communities for different purposes at different times of the year.
Who it belonged to was not a question that could be responded to with an easy-to-understand answer. At the top of the mountain, women might seek the gift of a dance or song to bring back to their people. Meanwhile, the middle regions were used for gathering plants in the spring by one group and for hunt- ing in the fall by another.
Geographical boundaries are perhaps those with which we are most famil- iar, visible in the paper and digital maps we consult and in the border controls we encounter when leaving our own habitats and entering others. The lines that separate nations, or communities, or individual parcels of land are ubiqui- tous yet almost always invisible unless marked by a fence or sign to let us know that it’s there. Despite this, they can powerfully impact the lives of human beings who navigate them, as well as the natural environments they bisect.
Some practices of beating the bounds can draw attention to qualities of extant boundaries that are often elided. Others can maintain borders that are at risk of being lost.
Casa Tamarindo is an art space and design studio located in Tijuana, Mexi- co, not far from the U.S. border and the city of San Diego. It has been described as a cross-border project since its inception. Founded by two brothers, the “vernacular design house” integrates the material impacts of the Mexico–U.S. border into its activities. For example, Casa Tamarindo works with local resi- dents to make crafts from synthetic waste and biomaterials, many of which are pulled from the heavily polluted Tijuana River.
The river has two principal sources. The first is the Arroyo Alamar, which rises from the Laguna Mountains and is known as Cottonwood Creek in the United States. It meets up with Tecate Creek before flowing into Mexico. The river runs through Mexico for most of its course before re-crossing the border into the U.S. and emptying into the Pacific Ocean on the southern edge of San Diego. Much of the household pollution in the river is introduced on the
Mexican side, where sewage treatment and waste facilities are less able to keep up with demands. The waste then finds its way to the U.S. and the Pacific. The crafts made from the waste at Casa Tamarindo are sold across the border to
U.S. consumers, drawing attention to the role the border plays in enabling and preventing cultural, material, human, and economic traffic.
Another example of how boundaries and borders can have massive impli- cations for communities is that of redlining, a term to describe a practice that originated a century ago in the United States. When planning for recovery during the Great Depression, redlining saw services withheld from particularly communities because they were classified as hazardous. Red lines were drawn around these areas on maps, informing policies and programs to support post-Depression recovery. The areas selected as hazardous were overwhelming- ly owned and inhabited by racial minorities. Decades later, the impact of these red lines, once only visible on paper, are evident in property values, crime rates, and quality of life measures.
Drawing lines and dividing up the landscape have long served to encourage a sense of order. John Harley, historian of cartography, argues that “maps creat- ed Empire.” When lines are clearly drawn, administration is greatly facilitated, and the natural world is more easily turned over to other work. The first rectan- gular land survey slogan in the U.S. was “Order upon the Land.”
Lines that serve the interests of order remain well-defended, sometimes absurdly so. More subtle geographical demarcations serve less well the needs of institutions of order, so they fade and shift, often disappearing entirely. This process is not a recent one. Lands once held in common with complex and in- tricate protocols for use and extraction went through a multi-century process of enclosure and simplification, first in Europe, then around the world. According to the United Kingdom’s own government sources, between 1604 and the First World War, Bills enacted by Parliament removed rights of use to formerly open and communal lands for just over one fifth of the total area of England.
Those dispossessed of communal resources often responded by poaching and trespassing. However, new ownership arrangements were defended vigi- lantly. Poaching resulted in the death penalty, while both unemployment and the vagrancy that it led to were considered criminal offences. The boundaries drawn served new masters and the written laws existed to attack any ambiguity. Uncertainty and contingency needed to be purged to avoid inefficiency in the use and enjoyment of a formerly shared terrain.
Government was an often-enthusiastic supporter of these changes. States generally prefer units of production that facilitate the efficient appropriation of gains and taxes. Mobile peoples, therefore, increasingly became the enemy of states intent on ensuring that everything was in its right place and in the hands of a legally understood owner. The Romani, pastoralists, traders, and migrants of various types were increasingly viewed with suspicion as they crossed lines that made parts of their activities opaque to administrators.
Nobel-Prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom spent her life examining how commons are sustained in different parts of the world. She found that caring for common resources is necessarily a multiple task, organized locally and described by cultural norms and expectations. Her research emphasized the importance of face-to-face communication. Yields from common resourc- es increase notably when decisions are preceded by in-person discussion of the various priorities and issues. Her research suggests that monological approaches to human-ecosystem interaction will eventually lead to depletion and collapse. Complex, messy, disordered approaches and institutional arrange- ments enhance ecological health and the sustainability of resources regardless of where one is looking.
As Western institutional approaches extended globally, fragmentation and enclosure generated an increasingly binary sense of the world. There were regions that were ordered and well-managed, which represented an abstraction of universal “good.” Those areas not yet tamed suggested primitive and chaotic inefficiency. In Necropolitics, Cameroonian political theorist Achille Mbembe describes these systems and processes of closure and demarcation and argues that the lines “between here and there, the near and the distant, the inside and the outside, serve as a Maginot Line for a major part of what passes as ‘global thinking’ today.”
As this space of the universal has grown, new challenges have arisen.
Surpluses of potentially productive people in one place needed to find ways to move to where they might put that productive potential to best use, whether institutionally or societally. Migration has come to be described as a journey of discovery, exploration, and self-creation. In service of the global, movement is encouraged, but not as an ongoing practice. A newcomer to Canada is meant to step from one set of categories and boundaries into another. The reality is quite different, with many arguing that their feet somehow remain in both places without fully finding traction in either. They are both here and there, yet neither there nor here. In Canada, people of Chinese ancestry have experienced abuse due to a tenuous visible connection to the place where the COVID-19 virus was believed to have originated. Categories are reworked and distorted to fit ideologies, both hopeful and cruel.
Each time we turn our heads to look at something else, we create a new periphery. What encroachments can we expect in the future? What categories will be leveraged? Less of the world exists outside the arguments and moral po- sitions of the economy. Primary forest and agricultural land held by small farm- ers is being acquired and developed. Deforestation and monocultures follow, which further limits our resiliency in times of crisis. Diversity and complexity are being streamlined. Previously contained pathogens spill out into livestock and human communities.
Space is also being positioned as a future site for human occupation and division. Just as European powers drew lines on a map to allocate the wealth of colonized lands, instruments of order are poised to sort and order digital words and then the solar system and beyond. Which boundaries will be carried forward? Which ways of knowing the world will inform the categories we use to make sense of our virtual and physical lives?
Boundaries of Community
The late 1970s were a time of drought in California. Restrictions on water use meant that swimming pools were left dry. An emerging skateboarding scene exploited these discontinuities in the urban landscape and formed a new subculture, with communities organizing around empty pools where people performed daring and foolhardy tricks. The scene lasted for a few years, then new patterns emerged. Cities are often resistant to uses outside of their designer’s intentions, but skateboarders who transgressed property lines and expectations created something new and profoundly disordering that persists in popular culture today.
Urban planners are beginning to recognize that rigidity in city design leads to both material and psychological harms for those who choose to live in them. Kieran Long, director at ArkDes, Sweden’s national centre for architecture and design, argues that the designer’s work is to make manifest societal ideas and values through the creation of contexts where these ideas might be encoun- tered. Daily tous les jours creates contexts for values of play and participation in community. At Participle, Jennie Winhall designs spaces for individual autono- my and collective compassion for those receiving welfare benefits, allowing for a greater say in how they search for employment. Haiyan Zhang generated a digital map that lets mothers explore radiation readings around them, finding safety and ownership in the decisions they make about their family’s security.
Long also argues that our public buildings and spaces capture the essence of our culture. Designers, planners, and architects can embrace the task, building a courthouse, for example, that reflects the idea of justice. At the same time, they can conceal or reveal our prejudices and weaknesses. What most cities in the developed world capture and represent is a preference for growth and efficiency. Visual order is paramount, becoming conflated in our minds with working order.
Almost fifty years after the publication of his Uses of Disorder, sociologist Richard Sennett co-authored with architect and urban designer Pablo Sendra a companion piece, Designing Disorder. Sendra and Sennett argue for an infra- structure of disorder, creating conditions for the unplanned use of the public realm in ways that bring people together in creative and self-directed activity. The current rigidity of cities restricts improvised activity, so different approach- es are required to deal with shocks and crises both now and in the future.
Apparent disorder allows for new networks and connections to form. The transformation of hard lines into places of intermingling can lead to new forms of governance and greater solidarity among communities and organizations.
Uncertainty around a site’s intended or pre-described uses can lead to innova- tions in how people come together and share learning. This necessary uncer- tainty is rare, however, as official ideologies ensure that the accepted uses of enclosed spaces are evident and enforced. Beating older bounds complicates these narratives and introduces the necessary contingency for new qualities to emerge. A swimming pool, empty or otherwise, belongs to the family on whose property it sits. Occupation by skateboarders looking for other thrills compli- cates that story. Perhaps surprisingly, there is little evidence of severe conflict between the owners of the empty pools and the skaters that turned them over to other uses.
Town-making, or machizukuri, refers to a Japanese process of citizen partic- ipation in the stewardship and management of a living environment, including both human and non-human elements. The frequency of disasters in Japan has led to local practices of revitalization and reconstruction. For this reason, town-making emphasizes local and vernacular responses. In recent years, there has been a surge in unusual partnerships between local communities and content creators for video games, anime, and manga that has driven tourism, bringing new resources and connections to local events.
Skateboarders jumping fences to make use of empty swimming pools is an extreme example of how space and time can be reappropriated. The outline and architecture of our communities regulate interactions. Sharp protrusions on a park bench prevent the homeless from sleeping there. In response we can shape our environment to mark out older or unofficial boundaries or we can modify our behaviour to reflect different understandings of which boundaries are meaningful. During the nineteenth century in North America, cemeter- ies were frequently used for picnics and other social gatherings. Celebrating among the dead was seen as natural and healthy. Graveyards are far more som- bre sites today, with laughter or loud voices viewed as somehow inappropriate or offensive. The care of our dead has become a job for experts and profession- als. More cemeteries are now private and guarded spaces rather than open, public commons where the living and dead might linger together.
Boundaries of Meaning
In early 2020, prior to the arrival of COVID-19 in Canada, I hoped to open my own cemetery. I had researched the idea and connected with various burial associations. A proposal was made, and a plan outlined to execute my unlikely vision. Ultimately, COVID-19 halted any progress I might have made. It now might take some time before I can realize this project, but I intend to do so before I have the need to become a long-term resident myself.
The initial idea behind the project was less about building another ceme- tery, for which there will be no end of demand, and more about how burial and the symbolic boundaries it enacts might be used as a hedge against other kinds of encroachment and trespass. In most parts of the world, it is illegal to disturb a burial site. In my proposal, I paint a picture of a pristine forest space for natu- ral burials, which involve neither chemicals nor synthetic materials. The bodies would decompose quickly, with little permanent trace of those left to rest. The archived memory of the burial, however, would serve as an effective boundary to economic or other forms of encroachment.
I hoped that symbolic boundaries against disturbing the dead might be transformed into literal ones. Few wouldn’t blush at the thought of paving over loved relatives to build a strip mall or new parking lot. The cemetery could take on all sorts of unusual shapes, encircling untouched forests, parks, or cultural- ly significant sites, and thereby serve as an indefinite deterrent against future efforts at development or expansion. The taboo against disturbing the dead could be deployed to resist disturbances of the living. The plan involved burials being recorded in a blockchain, an almost impossible to manipulate ledger that would ensure that the departed, and their resting places, would be known long after their remains had been converted into new life. The dead would be inte- grated with the surrounding soil, but the prohibition on encroachment could persist for as long as we had computers.
This is an extreme version of beating the bounds, asking those who plan for their own passing to literally place their bodies in the path of progress, something that is unlikely to have been proposed to Old Croghan Man prior to his death. A boundary for which there still exists recognition and support—the integrity of the dead—would be leveraged to bolster one that is failing—the integrity of the natural world and our cultural history. Of course, it is naïve to believe that the sanctity of the dead might deter even the most practically mind- ed of developers. Museums of natural history attest to the fact that not all burial grounds are treated equally. Nonetheless, lines can be redrawn, and certain taboos have duration, as well as power to ensure limits are respected.
The symbolic power of boundaries has a long history. The Romans had a god of borders, Terminus or Jupiter Terminalis. Anyone that moved a boundary marker would experience the vengeance of this god. Homo sacer were indi- viduals expelled from society because of such a violation of divine command.
People expelled in this way could be killed without incurring punishment by anyone that came across them. The nature of homo sacer has undergone nu- merous evolutions over time. In the fifth century B.C.E., the laws of the Twelve Tables stated that violating a plebeian tribune would be considered sacer. Vio- lations of public will deserved divine retribution. Throughout human history, transgressions have been revised continuously to suit the needs of whatever idea of order predominates at the time.
In Outsiders, sociologist Howard S. Becker explores the idea of transgres- sion and the derivation of categories of deviance. Social groups make rules, drawing lines between the acceptable and unacceptable, then apply the rules to particular people. Those deemed to have transgressed are labelled outsiders. Deviance, then, is not a quality of the person, but rather the result of the appli- cation of categories to the offender. Within my home, wearing shoes is strictly prohibited. A guest that refuses to remove their shoes when asked would be considered deviant. They would become an outsider, both figuratively and literally. The same rules do not apply to our neighbourhood convenience store and wearing shoes there would be in no way seen as deviance. In fact, taking them off would likely lead to concern and uncertain glances. We can beat the bounds of our own home because they align with the bounds of accepted prop- erty rights. To enforce a shoes-off policy in the convenience store would require different kinds of trickery.
Geographic enclosure in the modern world has overwhelming served the interests of private property, and by extension the ambitions of growth and efficiency. The urge to enclose symbolic categories has served similar ends, but through different means. While property rights are guarded by the implied violence of the state and a moral belief in the legitimacy of those rights, less tangible boundaries rely on the ongoing conditioning of the human spirit and the collective will to name transgression and deviance.
Frequently, we do this to ourselves. We have internalized the moral posi- tions of our culture, which guide us to obey the boundaries accepted by our peers and forget the ones that are more difficult to discern. My first experi- ence of ukai challenged what I knew. Categories failed me, and I was invited to process this disorder. Instead, I fell back on habitual patterns of critique and decided that this was a cruel practice. When things are open and unfinal- ized, we have agency to generate new ideas about what things mean. This is an uncomfortable and unsettling experience. Too often, we resort to official ideologies to interpret events. Closure objectifies. It turns an open, uncertain, contingent experience into something we recognize and understand because of our pre-existing beliefs. Recognition is closure.
For Richard Sennett, we require new and unsettling experiences to contin- ually re-open our internal categories. When we are young, we work out ways to make sense of the world and our feelings about it. New experiences challenge this closure, this sense of certainty, and so meaning is re-opened and we are invited to reconsider the lines we are using to map out the world. When we are insulated from uncomfortable experiences, whether by affluence or by algorithms trying to make us happy, this process of continuous re-opening is avoided, and we become stuck and less able to cope with moments where our maps fail us.
Others, such as philosopher Byung-Chul Han, argue that while our internal categories might remain fixed, we are collectively victim to a lack of closure in the world around us. Systems are established that are committed to a sin- gle-minded pursuit of improvement and size. In service to this never-ending acceleration, humans are recast as objects and our efforts directed toward realizing an endless hunger for faster and more.
External openness and internal closure lead us to feel both trapped and narcissistic. We become confident that our inner models of the world are appropriate and eternal. Yet we feel thrown about by external structures that demand that our self-development be aimed at the ambitions of broader eco- nomic, social, and technological systems.
In his Atlantic article “The Nuclear Family was a Mistake,” David Brooks addresses the question of external closure and internal openness. The bound- aries around families have shrunk over time, with the notion of the nuclear family coming to focus narrowly on parents, children, and pets to the exclusion of more distant relations. The new categories have enabled greater individual economic and social freedom as adults—initially men—have been able to pur- sue their own success without being constrained by the needs of many other people. Fewer bonds of responsibility have freed individuals to seek out their maximum economic benefit and adapt to social changes.
A 2017 survey by Statista found that 60% of Americans listed family as the most important aspect of their life. Another 31% indicated that it was one of the most important. Only 4% argued that family was not important at all. These inner beliefs are consistent over time. While the definition of family has been reworked, our inner sense of its importance has not.
However, Brooks argues that this individual freedom ultimately creates instability for families. Previously, he notes, societies consisted of “big, inter- connected, and extended families” that provided protection and support to the most vulnerable. The shift to smaller, nuclear families allowed individuals to maximize their talents but left too many without support except from over-bur- dened institutions. Complex and extended familial relationships now contrib- ute to a sense of disorder for those concerned with scaling economic and social well-being. Individual freedom, cut off from larger familial bonds, “liberates the rich and ravages the working-class and poor.” If the idea of family no longer includes the care of more distant relations who experience difficulty, what exactly are our inner categories describing? Where does the potential for grace, to care for others, come to rest? Beating the bounds, then, involves both the preservation of older definitions of family and the reworking of our inner categories to acknowledge that something is different. We can lobby for insti- tutions to take better care of our distant cousin unable to work. But we also can re-open our inner categories to include that cousin in our extended networks of obligation and compassion.
Bounds of disclosure have similarly changed over time. When once we might have feared our neighbours sharing our secrets with others or the state, we now do the work ourselves in a constant sequence of self-revelation and public affirmation. We are encouraged to declare our ideologies and our beliefs and to take a side in various cultural wars. The returns include small hits of serotonin from the likes and comments of others. There is a certain peace in organizing oneself on the side of the “good” and placing others with whom we disagree into the category of the “bad.” We make our allegiances known, boost- ing our confidence in the validity of our world view. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who spent eight brutal years in a Soviet Gulag might be forgiven for condemn- ing his captors for their incoherent evil. Yet, later in life, he reflected on the lines we draw between good and evil and where they might best be found:
If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
When we organize the world around us according to moral judgments, we are rewarded with reassurances that our choices are ethical and that we belong to a community of the similarly virtuous. Doubt and uncertainty around our own ideas of the world are inefficient. Certainty of our own righteousness al- lows us to commit ourselves fully to the work of improving ourselves in service to the systems we inhabit. Moments that draw attention to our alienation from the complexity and unfinalized nature of real life make us less able to contrib- ute to the efficient operation of the world. We are then tasked with our own improvement and self-realization. This work is never finished. Why is that?
One theory is that the increased pace of life has amplified our desire for certainty in our interactions with those around us. Nations such as Canada or the United States or Germany are becoming more culturally and socially diverse. We struggle to know if others share our values, yet we still possess a desire for trust and community. Capitalism presents its arguments for efficien- cy and growth as moral positions. Rather than doing the hard work of constant- ly re-negotiating the boundaries we want to live within, we accept the offer of belonging at the cost of other ways of knowing the world.
People want to erect signs of their existence and their values. They want these signs to be noticed. Our social, political, and economic lives are driven by the dynamic and continuous cooperation of diverse values and approaches. In fact, developments such as the postal service and fire protection came out of self-managed experimentation and effort. We must question the idea that the world around us is perpetually unfinalized, in- terrogating the ends to which our relentless self-improvement is directed.
Sometimes, we are enough, and the world is not.
In The Utopia of Rules, anthropologist David Graeber outlines how in Europe much of what we associate with the welfare state was not initiated by government but by community groups and organizations. The old society was rigid and finalized. Local responses allowed for new categories to emerge.
Social insurance, pensions, public libraries, and public health clinics were overt attempts to build “new society in the shell of the old.” Institutions of order eventually occupied these projects and integrated them into their own struc- tures, often removing relationships and values in the name of scale but none would have been possible without unstructured, disorderly, and participatory elements. The practice of beating the bounds is a return to ways of organizing and effecting change that are threatened with erasure. When we limit our par- ticipation to worked-out systems and institutions, we are inevitably participat- ing in official ideologies. Those territories are already well-defended.
The practice of beating the bounds asks that we act as if the invisible rules that describe the boundaries of a space, event, or idea either do not exist or exist otherwise. We sometimes describe people as “following the beat of their own drummer,” although this is generally not an endorsement. The capacity to beat the bounds is the capacity to animate boundaries that we know—as individu- als or communities— yet receive little official support for their maintenance.
Frequent examples of this in action serve as signs of hope. Neighbours deliver food to people who are at risk. Citizens go out at night to walk their commu- nities and provide aid to those in need. Individuals create habitats for migrant bird species. People clean up trash they find in parks. Mutual aid seems to ap- pear wherever aid is required and where the institutions generally tasked with support either can’t or won’t address the issue.
Robin Wall Kimmerer, a scientist and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, understands her work as a biologist as both a responsibili- ty and a relationship to the natural world she adores. Her approach to research has generated new ways of thinking about the natural world. In Gathering Moss, she describes how disturbances affect ecologies. In the absence of any disturbance, efficient competitors like conocephalum (liverwort) will dominate, driving out most other species. When there is frequent disturbance, only the hardiest species thrive. However, there is a middle ground of episodic distur- bance that prevents dominance or monoculture but is stable for long enough that successive species can be established and carve out a niche. Diversity and resilience are maximized when the ecology is patchy, of different ages, and with different disturbance cycles.
Ecologies that include human elements can be understood in a similar way. Extreme order leads to few or no disturbances. Approaches developed in response to past crises are forgotten. When the hurricane arrives or the next pandemic is discovered, we have fewer options to draw upon in response. Con- stant disturbance allows too little time for rituals and theories of the world to be devised. We all become dandelions, growing in whatever cracks and open- ings we can find. Variegated boundaries encountered on different planes and at different times support collective resilience. Official boundaries need to be complicated by unofficial or entirely new ones.
The practice of beating the bounds is a practice of remembering. It prior- itizes the stewardship of approaches that are hard to justify given the current state of the world. So much of our categorization is automatic and uncon- scious. I wasn’t aware that there was a “right way” to catch fish until confront- ed with another way of doing so. Certain approaches take hold and become pre-located in my mental models of the world. Others disappear or are never available at all, appearing like ghosts. As cultural theorist k-punk argued in a prolific blog in the early 2000s, haunting is a disorder of time and space. We must learn to haunt the forgotten borders.
The Migration residency was developed so that cultural practices could be car- ried into digital spaces without being refused or undergoing significant mutilation in the process. I am skeptical that a haptic feedback suit and taiko drumming will come to cultural pre-eminence, but the fact that taiko may exist in a form that hon- ors its own values and history is a victory. I believe that individuals and commu- nities have a responsibility to confront orders and structures that are harmful and beat out alternatives for public consideration. This must be done in ways that don’t require the absorption or sublimation of the contesting approach.
Ukai is an alternative to commercial fishing that persists. It has been trans- formed over time to accommodate the world around it but continues to centre the values that gave form to the practice in the first place—an affirmation of a relationship with the natural world, a form that is awe-inspiring, and a product that is directed toward the well-being of the local community.
Beating the bounds persists into the modern day despite improvements in map-making and border-marking. Many of the boundaries monitored in rural England and Wales no longer correspond to those registered with municipali- ties. What kind of crisis or disaster would require youth and the elderly to beat a line around a village’s limits? The fact that I have no answer is generally the point. We need to preserve collective practices in order to deal with the unknown.
Our ordered world is quite good at dealing with events that it already understands. A novel pathogen, however, paralyzes much of the planet for years. Human-generated climate change may lead to other events for which our existing models are unsuitable. In Japan, local shrines are cleaned and maintained by local citizens. This is a collective practice that creates the ground for other forms of mutual aid and support. Certainly, the maintenance of the tiny neighbourhood shrines could be turned over to a paid professional or the municipality, but then the memory of communal action would atrophy, and the community-based aid stations set up in response to the Fukushima disaster might not have emerged so quickly or so meaningfully.
My imaginary cemetery offers another potential approach. Taboos and calls to the sacred can serve the needs of efficiency or add friction to these inter- actions. Friction is particularly useful, especially when making things harder supports different values and needs. The sacred can be leveraged to create and strengthen boundaries. Official ideologies draw on similar tactics. The self-oppressive urge to improvement and other practices of self-confession draw on moral arguments. Efficiency and growth are a form of catechism. If all divisions are constructed and evolving, then enforcing these divisions involves threats and bluffs to sustain them.
William James argued that perceiving things as finalized makes changing them harder. Once we understand reality as less about things made and more about things in the making, we can move away from definition and into undi- vided life. Some knowledge must constantly be re-animated. Beating bounda- ries serves to remind us that the world is always being made and that catego- ries are open to contestation.
Poetry reanimates language with meaning. Beating the bounds means stepping outside of critique and describing new shapes by which the world can be organized and considered. American writer Paul Goodman, quoted in De- manding the Impossible by Peter Marshall, argues that a free society “cannot be the substitution of a ‘new order’ for the old order.” Rather, he suggests, “it is the extension of spheres of free action until they make up most of social life.” Through lingering, through interrupting, through creating our own theories and rituals for the world, and by beating the bounds of categories we’d like to keep for future generations, this extension becomes possible. The vague and the ambiguous are not corrupting features of a pristine order but, instead, qualities of the periphery that can become centered simply by changing where we look.
10. Tubu
I am not proposing a return to the Stone Age. My intent is not reaction- ary, nor even conservative, but simply subversive. It seems that the utopian imagination is trapped, like capitalism and industrialism and the human population, in a one-way future consisting only of growth. All I’m trying to do is figure out how to put a pig on the tracks.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World
We are approaching the conclusion of this text. Usually, that would involve reminders of what has already been said and some hopeful framing for where things might go next. There will be some of that, but the nature of my argu- ment demands some uncertainty. As an advocate of the conscious re-opening of categories that have tended to be viewed as finalized, policed by human institutions and machine algorithms, it would be suspect for me to suggest any sense of closure.
While researching this book, I looked up the phrase “in praise of disorder” on the web and came across a chapter in Legalism: Rule and Categories by Judith Scheele. Scheele is interested in how European attempts at the coloniza- tion of Africa created moments of contact among cultures with different ways of understanding the world. The cliché that history is written by the winners mostly held true, with countless cultures encountered and discarded with little in the way of curiosity or humility. The Tubu people of Chad, Libya, Niger, and Sudan, however, caused some consternation among French colonizers.
Tubu culture and practices have long been described as “anarchic” by both Europeans and non-Tubu neighbours in Chad. In terms of political and social organizing, for example, the Tubu have no conception of a “chief,” whether determined by birth, tradition, or consent. This was understood as strange and deserving of concern. Longer exposure revealed more fundamental differences.
The Tubu elevate erratic personal interactions and celebrate the unpre- dictability of individuals. For the Tubu, disorder is not a problem to be solved but rather a source of pride. Disorder represents individual and collective self-authorization. Spontaneous freedom is pursued, and societal structures are organized around its achievement. The Tubu have preserved values that define them as a people and Scheele’s chapter attempts to unpack what others mean by the term anarchic. Even today, those living together with the Tubu confess to struggling with the absence of readily identifiable tools of social control.
Ultimately, Scheele argues that what makes the Tubu distinctive is less the absence of hierarchies or moral admonitions than their reluctance to abstract the contingent and their desire to avoid any ossified predictability. Tubu communities in northern Chad continue to exhibit a conscious and consistent refusal of explicit categories.
Somehow, the Tubu survived their encounters with European powers and with neighbouring Muslim empires. Upon reading Scheele’s chapter, I became intrigued by the possibility of one day visiting a Tubu community to experience this for myself. New possibilities opened. At that time, I was not anticipating a multi-year restriction on movement caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Even without local restrictions, the people of Chad lack easy access to vaccines, personal protective equipment, and the infrastructure necessary to restrict the spread of contagion. A trip there would be both foolish and selfish, but I am encouraged that unpopular ways of knowing the world persist despite the pressures to conform to a global order of rational efficiency. Enormous resourc- es are put into taming diverse and patchy assemblages of people and environ- ments, and yet the Tubu hold on, for now at least.
The criticism and marginalization of the Tubu way of life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries extended from an unquestioned adherence to the official ideology carried by the French colonizers and the defence of this order from insurgents or substitutes. Tubu approaches are not just of a different type but pose a general threat to assumptions about the evolution of culture over time. Implicit assumptions in industrialized nations about the world often hold that our current arrangement is necessarily the culmination of centuries of on- going evolution and improvement. Past approaches are, by definition, inferior to our current one. When the Tubu experienced the evident superiority of the French approach, they ought to have graciously accepted the upgrade. This isn’t how evolution works, though. The appropriateness of a solution is assessed in relation to its environment. The world around us undergoes constant changes and cultural responses are preserved or discarded based on how well they seem to address needs over time.
In Wayfinders, National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Wade Davis argues that too often we understand other cultures and other approaches, particularly Indigenous ones, as “failed attempts at modernity.” He worries that our dismissal of diverging approaches will limit “our human repertoire for dealing with all the challenges that will confront us as a species over the coming centuries.” Just as we wouldn’t think to use a computer from 2012 when we could upgrade to one from 2022, why would we leverage tradition- al cultures when we have ready access to a modern one? Unlike the comput- ers, though, cultures represent local adaptations and local cosmologies that have been chosen consciously as appropriate to deal with the world as these communities perceive it at given moments in time. Computers are more easily compared to each other, and the context matters little. Approaches to catching fish are only comparable if we remove the specific conditions under which the fish are to be caught, shared, and consumed. Our ideas of time combine with our ideas of scale to do away with solutions that reify past adaptations to crisis or that are less amenable to expansion and acceler- ation. Our inventory of approaches dwindles as a result.
Scale
Collectively, we do a poor job of imagining the kinds of shocks we will expe- rience over time, as evidenced in recent times by the unexpected impact of the Great Recession and COVID-19. Because of this, it makes sense to develop a capacity to navigate those uncertain moments and to ease the pressures on our highly ordered systems, avoiding the risk of unanticipated failures. Academic and social activist bell hooks described oppression as the absence of choices.
We generally imagine that this absence of choice comes from restrictions on access imposed by others. Redlining determined the availability of government supports based on race. The English prevented the Irish from eating the abun- dant grains during a period of catastrophic blight for the potato.
What we are seeing, however, is the removal of choice through the increas- ing hegemony of growth and efficiency as moral positions. This hegemony is enforced and amplified by systems such as those administered by machine learning and other algorithms, as well as the institutions that design them. The Japanese government provides data to the Japanese people in ways that made it difficult to assess risk in a granular way. The arrival of capsule pens, electric lights, and chrome fittings squeezes out aesthetics of shadow and reticence.
Researchers Alex Hanna and Tina M. Park published “Against Scale” to arXiv in 2020 while Hanna was working at Google. The short paper speaks pointedly to mounting concern within the technology sector about the elevation of scale into an all-encompassing ideology.
According to the article, there are three core tenets to scale thinking:
All three of these tenets have shown up in our story so far, particularly the shift from understanding scale as something that is desirable to something that is morally good. The efficacy of violence to suppress the local and contingent diminishes with distance from the source of that violence. When we internalize the moral positions of official ideologies then violence becomes less necessary. We self-oppress and monitor those around us in the ideology’s name.
The practical implications of this trend toward scale thinking in the technol- ogy sector are significant. How technology understands the world is having dra- matic implications for how our world is organized and understood. If technol- ogies are designed with the assumption that human beings are objects in need of optimization, then our experiences of life come to reflect this. Scale requires units to be quantifiable and manipulable, to be “interchangeable, abstract, and universal.” Units in this case refers to servers, offices, databases, and individ- ual workers, but the logic, extended to the whole world, comes to encompass nature, personal dignity, and human cultures. Scale works with objects and those objects belong to sets of objects that the algorithm understands. Ukai fell outside of my categories but instead of leaning into this disorder, I categorized it as cruel so that I could move past my discomfort. If my own behaviour falls outside of an algorithmic system’s parameters, I too run the risk of being cate- gorized or rendered invisible.
Scale also requires users and other inhabitants of these systems to be con- sistent and interchangeable, which is “most often to the detriment of people ‘at the margins.’” Here are echoes of Procrustes: difference is transformed to make it legible, controllable, and knowable. We cease to be subjects with our own horizons and our own interior life. Instead, we are viewed as objects to be monitored and controlled within a finite and legible environment.
We fear what might come next. Rather than developing better tools and approaches to live in this volatility, we have become committed to making the world predictable and ordered enough that the tools we already have remain useful. Disorder surprises these rigid systems that seek to objectify and optimize human beings. Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic is that rare crisis where centralized control is considered effective at mitigating its effects, thereby establishing a potentially dangerous precedent for how we deal with future shocks.
In The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World, psychologist James Hillman reflects on the nature of evil and offers a somewhat surpris- ing perspective:
Evil is not what one expects: cruelty, moral perversion, power abuse, terror. These are its instruments or its results. But the deepest evil in the totalitarian system is precisely that which makes it work: its programmed, single-minded, monotonous efficiency ... the dulling daily service, standard, boring, letter-perfect, uniform.
The problem is not the specific beliefs that are pre-located in society.
Whether a single-minded focus on scale or an inflexible pursuit of an idea of fairness, it is the rigidity with which our models of the world take hold that be- comes the real danger. This rigidity has serious implications for both our inner and outer lives. Internally, our disenchantment expands as the magical and the mysterious are drained from the experiences available to us. Externally, we are increasingly disciplined. Consequently, we seem more regularized in our movements, in our habits, in our discourse, and in our manners. Risks in the present escalate and cascade into the future as the domination of scale extends and deepens.
We face and will continue to face uncertain shocks. The greater the diversity of knowledge available to us to draw upon, the better able we are to respond to the unexpected. Knowledge must be embodied and practiced for it to be effective. Yet we are losing the habitat for this diversity to be sustained. Riding a bike and reading a book on riding a bike are different activities. We are get- ting better at assessing the probability of outcomes with which we are familiar and then designing systems that nudge us toward the most profitable or least frightening outcomes. However, we are getting worse at imagining and dealing with the unexpected, both individually and collectively, and we are squeezing out ways of knowing the world that might provide us with early warning or means of response.
Our need for new solutions is accelerating as we hurry to keep up with changes in the world. However, the bank of approaches we draw upon is becoming increasingly homogenous in terms of the values that it celebrates. There has long been an awareness of how efficiency serves to finalize and extend the values that underpin the order to which we collectively commit ourselves. Labor leader and activist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn defined sabotage as “the withdrawal of efficiency” in pamphlets as early as 1917. As such, calls to in- terrupt and question efficiency as an organizing value are not new. Philosopher Jacques Ellul was a critic of technological development prior to the modern explosion of digital connectivity. In Darrell Fasching’s The Thoughts of Jacques Ellul, he describes Ellul’s belief that modern technology is a “total phenomenon for civilization, the defining force of a new social order in which efficiency is no longer an option but a necessity imposed on all human activity.” The need to develop practices of response is increasingly urgent.
Growth, like efficiency, has ceased being something valuable as a means to an end and has assumed the qualities of an end itself. Economic growth was not originally intended to serve as a measure of overall well-being. We have lost our desire and ability to articulate other goals for a range of reasons. Envi- ronmental activist George Monbiot in a 2017 opinion piece for The Guardian argued that the loss of an explicit objective for economic activities has result- ed in the capture of our imagination about the economy by the proxy goal of endless growth. We need a system that accounts for a range of ideas regarding what constitutes a beautiful life, providing for them within our limited means. Instead, we have a system that relentlessly pursues growth, despite the fact that many are dislocated or thrown about by that pursuit, while other solutions are invisibly removed from consideration altogether.
Statements from some of the wealthiest in society suggest that this trend is likely to continue. Jeff Bezos is the founder of Amazon and has extraordinary wealth and power. Bezos is also a member of an exclusive club of commercial astronauts. He has frequently remarked that he is concerned that humanity’s need for energy will soon surpass our limited supplies. He is less concerned with the threat of extinction than with the possibility of stasis. We will have to stop growing, which, to Bezos and many others, is a very bad future indeed.
The extension of human activity into space becomes the logical next move to ensure that growth and improvements in efficiency continue endlessly.
We are sacrificing the capacity to productively engage with the disorderly.
We are losing our ability to deal with the unexpected, sprinting to keep up with the changes necessary to keep things in order. This is a product of what academic and arts critic Tyson Yunkaporta refers to in Sand Talk as the “rela- tively recent demand that simplicity and order be imposed on the complexity of creation.” If the 2007–8 financial crisis revealed the risks of the unrestrained pursuit of wealth and efficiency, then we have failed to learn its lessons as evidenced by our lack of readiness for the COVID-19 pandemic. Practices of disorder complicate and fragment the power of official ideologies to shape our inner and outer lives.
Philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin argues for the essential role of individual and personal systems of behaviour that contrast and contaminate fixed systems of values. He understands these local and vernacular practices as “more sensitive, more responsive, more excitable and livelier” than those that have been trans- formed into the logic of institutional and algorithmic operation. The unfin- ished character of these practices is what provides them with their power. They have the capacity to evolve with the world.
The capacity to manifest the unofficial, by definition, requires a place to look out from. Unlike algorithmic systems, we have a body, a place in the world, and cultures we inherit to construct a point from which to view. We can cast this consciousness outward to occupy the viewpoints of those around us and see the world from many bodies, many places, and through the lenses of many cultures. Algorithmic systems only see what they are designed to see and only act based on the rules that we give them to follow. Only the measurable world is legible to these systems. Individual humans and human communi- ties provide the potential for multiple points of view, the opportunity to walk around the mountain in order to assess the right route to its summit.
Values of intimacy, relationality, and care rely on the existence of the body and can only extend from an ability to perceive others as embodied and vul- nerable beings. By acknowledging the interiority of others, we introduce the possibility of alternative ways of knowing being centered in the interactions we experience and support. We need technologies, methods, and practices that help us cultivate and share this polyphony, rather than tools that invisibly herd us into sharply distinct realities. We need more ways to live together without sacrificing the ways we hope to live.
In Anarchism, political biographer and historian George Woodcock exam- ined the revolutions of the past century and concluded that revolution in au- thoritarian systems usually ends in “the creation of a more efficiently coercive society in its place.” He believed that collective liberation is evolutionary and requires a commitment to “seizing the opportunities for piecemeal changes.” We must be opportunistic and seek out areas where “authoritarian and bureau- cratic measures have manifestly failed or over-extended themselves” and then put into effect other ways of living together.
Practices of Disorder
Disorder exists whether we want it to or not. We can commit our time and energy to building ever-greater rigidity and control, or we can learn to cultivate local disorder and to become better prepared for when it is imposed upon us. In the case of the former, the nature of entropy will lead to the gradual ratchet- ing up of pressure until we see sudden release for which our existing solutions and practices are unlikely to be adequate. In the latter, there will be discom- fort and efforts at control, backed both by implied violence and explicit moral arguments. Nonetheless, local practices of disorder are necessary to cultivate a sense of awe and wonder, which will allow for new ways of experiencing and understanding the world. Disorder also diversifies the solutions we can draw upon to respond to change and liberates us from the acceleration and relent- lessness of connected life. Personal and collective practices of disorder are necessary rebukes to official ideologies that are deeply entrenched in societal structures and cultural beliefs.
There are practical reasons for us to build this capacity despite the modern world’s lack of tolerance for it. We are losing our ability to be in relationship with events that don’t make sense to us or that don’t quite fit. Perhaps we wouldn’t insist that they fit if we had better stories and approaches for them or if we had practices and rituals that allowed the unfinalized to remain so.
Neuroscientist Beau Lotto and his team of researchers looked at experiences of awe for audience members at Cirque du Soleil performances. Explaining the work, Lotto explained that “the hypothesis we’re testing is that maybe awe is evolution’s solution to stepping forward into uncertainty, to help us step into that place in order to see things differently.” He elaborated, “Because if we don’t, we don’t evolve.”
Psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman and his colleagues developed a means of assessing moments of awe. The system describes the essential elements of
- “awe experiences,” which were summarized by Kaufman in a Scientific Ameri- can article “Can You Quantify Awe?”
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Vastness: “I felt in the presence of something grand.”
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Need for Accommodation: “I felt challenged to mentally process what I was experiencing.”
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Time: “I sensed things momentarily slow down.”
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Self-diminishment: “I felt that my sense of self was diminished.”
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Connectedness: “I had the sense of being connected to everything.”
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Physical Sensations: “I felt my jaw drop.”
This maps very well to the practices outlined in this book. Ideas of connec- tion and vastness point to the decomposition of categories and the possibility of stepping into new ones. Awe demands that we process what is happening and assess the efficacy of existing categories to describe an experience. A sense of self is reduced, and other factors gain focus and intensity. Certain uncom- fortable emotions were also related to awe experiences including the feeling of being “stressed, nervous, overwhelmed.” Avoiding our urge to rely on existing categories is necessary if we hope to break up recalcitrant or brutal routines.
Holding oneself in discomfort takes practice.
In my experience, creation and change most often emerge when we escape from our established assumptions or contexts. Usually, this happens with the support of another context or set of assumptions that is seemingly at odds with the first but that provides a new way of viewing what we already believed we understood. By creating new contexts for different patterns to emerge, we cre- ate moments of escape from official ideologies. This is the path of reformation rather than destruction. Fishing with cormorants complicates rather than re- sists existing approaches. It suggests the possibility of other ways and suggests permission to try them. As sociologist Ruha Benjamin observed during her talk at MUTEK Forum in 2020:
If inequality is woven into the very fabric of society, then each twist, coil, and code is a chance for us to weave new patterns, practices, politics—its vastness will be its undoing once we accept that we are pattern makers.
There is certainly an arrogance to the belief that efficiency and growth are suitable values around which to organize all human systems. Often, however, these assumptions are products of unreflective habit. By drawing attention to them, other things become possible. Once the distinction has been made, though, dominant systems can and do push back.
Generous Entrepreneurship
From 2017 to 2019 I served as the program director for Artscape Launch- pad, a 30,000 square-foot art-and-design hub near the waterfront in Toronto. I was tasked with designing and providing entrepreneurial training to a diverse community of artists and other creators in a highly competitive and expensive city. Data painted a distressing picture for young creators looking to build a ca- reer. In 2016, just under 1% of the overall labor force were employed as artists in Canada. The artistic labour force in Canada differs from the broader pop- ulation in a few ways. On average, an artist or creator is more likely to have a bachelor’s degree or higher compared to the overall labour force (44% vs. 27%). They also are more likely to be self-employed (52% vs. 12%). Median income, however, is 45% lower than for all Canadian workers, though this varies consid- erably across disciplines and industries.
Entrepreneurial training traditionally prioritizes skill-building, with a particular focus on financial and digital literacy. Ideas of hustle are central, and entrepreneurs are encouraged to innovate business models and approach new markets in order to expand the financial possibilities of their practice. This was the context into which I was introduced. Thankfully, I was hired prior to the opening of the physical space, which gave us a little time to figure out where things could go.
Lingering allowed us to listen to what creators were saying and to begin to experience the world through the lens of their experiences. Categories began to dissolve. Lines that separated practices and practitioners seemed increasingly arbitrary. Lines dividing industries and geographies were revealed as similarly permeable with creators shifting from context to context, seeking to make a home for their creativity.
The dominant values traditionally associated with entrepreneurship are those of the broader economy. Entrepreneurs are assumed to need more efficient approaches to growth. Scale is considered the beginning, middle, and end. Yet this approach fit poorly with the nature of the practices under consideration, as well as with the expressed desires of those who would be served by the work.
In fact, the dominant value surfaced during that period of lingering was of relationality and generosity. Creators consistently pointed to their communi- ties and fellow creators as the enablers of their success. Rather than being in constant competition, we found networks of mutual support and reciprocity. We decided to interrupt the existing routine of entrepreneurial programming centered on getting bigger faster and, instead, designed the programs around ideas of generosity. Despite the evidence piling up in support of this approach, there was pushback from both industry partners and internal stakeholders.
We then designed programmatic rituals that reflected the values we hoped to make central in the work. Participating entrepreneurs spent as much time supporting and reflecting on the ambitions of their fellow participants as they did on their own. Connecting became a repeated and structured practice for all participants as they found ways of entangling their networks with their fellow learners. In fact, the final activity for our one-week intensive program asked participants to engage with the stakeholders and community of a fellow learner to test emerging theories and assumptions on their behalf.
For example, through this intensive program, a poet that wrote in Arabic, began to understand her work as a means of complicating and depolarizing anti-Muslim views among non-Muslims across North America. One of her assumptions was that the reference narrative for the Muslim world in Canada was of violence and terrorism. A Cuban photographer who had been working with this poet over the week, was then tasked with going out and interviewing various stakeholders to test this assumption. He brought back video of people willing to share their thoughts and the outcomes brought the poet to tears of pleasure and surprise. Only a very small number of those interviewed experi- enced Muslim identity through the lens of violence. Overwhelmingly, though, people shared stories of dance, food, and gatherings with friends. As a Muslim woman that wore a hijab, the authentic thoughts of strangers and collaborators about the Muslim world were believed to be inaccessible to her. The generous gift of the photographer provided a moment of wonder and the potential for new directions. Theories were tested in ways that could never scale but that placed generosity at their heart.
Wanting to ensure that our rituals and theories were appropriate, we partnered with Canadian Heritage, a federal department, to run a series of pedagogical experiments comparing our method with traditional approaches to instruction. Specifically, we looked at how copyright and intellectual property knowledge could be shared with creators. With one group, we brought in a lawyer to share information, respond to questions, and offer one-to-one mentoring where requested. With another group, focused on generosity and relationality, the lawyer was present in a very similar way to the participants. They were involved in site visits and conversations but made no presentation to the group.
A test administered following the program showed that both experimental groups had near-identical improvements in knowledge of the copyright and intellectual property regime. However, participants in the second group ex- pressed greater comfort interacting with the legal system and greater appreci- ation of the overlaps between the legal and cultural sectors. In the first cohort, participants expressed distaste or frustration with the invited expert. In the second, they attested to the development of long-term relationships and friend- ship with the lawyer. In both cases, the lawyer was the same person.
As the prototypes suggested potential, we then moved to train and develop facilitators for the program. We asked artists and creators to identify those they felt were the most generous in their communities. Overwhelmingly the names we received were of women, and specifically women of colour. I had inherit- ed a community of facilitators from a predecessor and the differences were stark. The inherited list was full of successful artists and entrepreneurs, often men, who were willing to share what they had learned from their positions of establishment and success. The new list mainly featured women who were unknown outside their communities, but who had demonstrated an ongoing commitment to supporting others. Drawing on different assumptions and mappings, we opted to replace the successful, high-profile facilitators (who were thanked for their service) with people from the new list.
While I can point to many successes that came from these efforts, we eventually succumbed to official ideologies and concerns. We initially offered programming for about two hundred creators each year. As the facility opened, senior leadership expanded their expectations to enrolments in the thousands. The work wasn’t built to scale so quickly as it relied on nurturing relationships over time, gaining deep knowledge of the specific ambitions of participants.
Eventually, the financial and funding needs of the larger institution won out, and I felt compelled to step away.
Successful birds build their nests on fragile branches. If the branch is too strong, then the cat will find the nest and eat the parents and their young. If the branch is too weak, the nest will tumble after the first storm or strong wind.
The program was embedded in a large and well-known institution adminis- tering enormous assets. The resources and support were compelling and so I built on a strong branch. Too strong, as it turned out when the cat showed up.
I am interested in finding approaches that help us live together in this world, rather than one that lets us see and experience different realities. This is an ongoing process, and one that can lead to frustration and failure as local, vernacular approaches collide with the strength of official ideologies. Rather than investing in building or preserving a stable environment, we need to de- velop our ability to deal with disturbances. Any stability is chimeric, as the forc- es of entropy will eventually win out. One positive outcome from the entrepre- neurial programming was the compelling evidence that relationships of trust and generosity are essential to improve our resilience in moments of crisis.
Relationships
With ukai, the strings that connect the cormorants in the water with the men and women in the boats are understood as enabling and affirming by some, as restraining or cruel by others. The same is true of the relationships that connect us with each other. We can experience our ties to other people as oppressive or as liberating or as contextual and ever-changing. Sociologist Rich- ard Sennett first described the steady simplification of social interactions and the complexification of technical and administrative systems fifty years ago.
The trend continues unabated. Our political and economic contexts are defined by a set of values whose implications have resulted in a radical restructuring and simplification of our social arrangements. Religion brings comfort to fewer people. We grow afraid of a future that is no longer full of promise.
Relationality and sociality were the traditional means for new forms of order to emerge in a society. Impromptu and experimental forms allowed for approaches to be tested. Once proven, they were often captured and trans- formed by official ideologies and institutions. The core benefits were generally preserved, though some of the specific relational qualities were lost as services were scaled, as has been the case with charitable aid and the postal service.
However, the growing hegemony of formal and finalized systems undermines the capacity for ongoing mutuality and cooperation. This reduces our ability to devise new forms when new challenges arise. Philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas argued that in the industrialized world, the moral positions of bureaucracy and capitalism have colonized the “lifeworld” and squeezed out or destroyed traditional and organic social practice and organization. The fabric of our communities has been profoundly altered.
We should be capable of devising and sustaining different kinds of relation- ships with our families, our neighbours, and our communities. Practices of lingering, interrupting, theorizing, ritualizing, and beating the bounds can be embedded in relationships with others and sustained through a reworking of community. New forms can then be realized.
This will necessarily involve a commitment to experimentation and explora- tion with new ways of organizing and collaborating. When we actively choose approaches that prioritize values other than efficiency and growth there are consequences and pressures to conform to the expectations of precedent. Cen- tripetal forces pull events toward order. Centrifugal forces spin events outward and allow for new arrangements to be perceived.
The unprecedented nature of the COVID-19 epidemic has prompted inno- vation in how people work together to get things done. In April 2020, George Farcasiu, the lead automation engineer for Bed-Stuy Strong, a New York City network of mutual aid launched to respond to the pandemic, told the technol- ogy publication Motherboard that “we’re making sure we’re building tools that are about organizing people to interact with neighbors, not treating volunteers as boxes that do work.” Growth and efficiency require structures that scale, and this way of organizing is replicated routinely, if implicitly, in how problems are framed, and solutions are measured.
For my part, I helped establish a community of around 100 individuals from across five continents committed to addressing issues of equity in re- sponse to COVID-19. The Maitri Platform emerged in early 2020 to address the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the underserved, such as Indige- nous communities, migrant workers, refugees, slum dwellers, and people living in rural poverty.
Though geographically separated and working in a wide range of sec- tors, we shared a desire for a better, more intentional and just response to COVID-19. This was predicated on the belief that our interconnected world is only as strong as its weakest links, and that pandemics know no borders.
Maitri has been understood, from its birth, as an organic and unplanned growth of connections and flows of resources in support of those most in need. Traditionally, when we organize to do something, we default to the metaphor of the machine. In a machine, every part has a specialized role and failure to fill that role means the machine will break and the part will need to be replaced.
Machines are built to go faster and grow bigger. Machines have no emotions and transform an input (money, plastic) into an output (shelter, medical masks). Machines do one job well and other machines do other jobs. There is a clear what and a clear how. Decision-making and visible targets can be meas- ured to gauge success.
Maitri Platform was inspired by the structure of mycelial networks, such as those found in many species of mushroom. The decision to use this as an overarching model and metaphor has supported internal coherence and coordi- nated action externally. Metaphors are important because they serve as instruc- tions and as an orientation to behaviour. If Maitri were a machine, for example, we might ask “What does this machine do?” or “How effective is it at doing it?” Machines are linear, and they minimize the social needs of human beings. Reality is complex, non-linear, and very social. It is for these reasons that Maitri chose an organic model.
Mycelia look something like trees or spiderwebs. We most often see them on food that is beginning to rot. The structure acts like a plant root and is ini- tially used as a way for the fungus to find nutrients. Fungi don’t move around but mycelium allow them to explore outwards for things like water and nutri- ents such as nitrogen, carbon, potassium, and phosphorus, which the myceli- um transports to other places.
One of Maitri’s intentions is to reimagine organizing to better respond to communities that are in crisis, regardless of location. Maitri also emphasizes the interdependence of human activity. Crises in one location will inevitably affect other locations. Mycelia do more than grow outward to find resources. They form connections with other species in their environment.
In a mycelial network, the fungus doesn’t know where the resources are. Mycelia reach out and report back on what they find. Sometimes they find nothing, and no further growth happens. Sometimes they find resources, which they can start transporting back to where they are needed. Occasionally, they find trees or other plants, whose roots they connect, exchanging resources and communicating what is happening in different parts of the forest. Mycelia, trees, and plants work together to ensure the health of the whole system. Maitri is modeled on this underground and underappreciated network.
Since its inception, Maitri has driven a range of outwardly eclectic projects.
A garment factory in India was converted to the production of personal pro- tective equipment. Fundraising support was provided to amplify Indigenous women-led projects in the United States. Last-generation sleep apnea machines were converted to use in low-resource clinical settings to support respiratory challenges for COVID-19 sufferers. As India entered a second wave of cases, we supported response in East Africa, which relies heavily on India for medical support and supplies. Maitri’s successes owed less to expertise than to relation- ships and resources that facilitated action.
Despite these successes, though, we experienced a crisis of metaphor.
Many potential volunteers, contributors, and collaborators were uncomfort- able with Maitri’s assumptions and organizing frameworks. Some pointed to inefficiencies and the lack of specialization. Others were confused by the focus on relationships. We have an image in our mind of what effective organizing and response should look like and are troubled when confronted by something different.
Perhaps we could have accomplished more measurable outcomes if we had committed to existing models of emergency response. We felt intense internal and external pressure to leverage our scarce resources efficiently. Our actions had material impact on the well-being of communities in crisis. The urge to abide by official ideologies was intense and yet we recognized the need to try new approaches, and to refine them over time. The repurposing of sleep apnea machines to address the effects of COVID-19 is an example of one solution that was unlikely to have emerged from a traditional approach.
The pressure we felt is not unique to the experience of emergency respond- ers. Whether working in retail, health, insurance, or art, assumptions of growth and efficiency are always present as an unspoken moral position. If a charity tries something new and fails, they are reproached for the waste involved. A business that lacks plans for growth is hardly considered a business at all.
Self-restraint and self-confession aren’t unique to Western modernity. In Der Mythos vom Zivilisationsprozeß, (The Myth of the Civilizing Process) ethnol- ogist and cultural anthropologist Hans Peter Duerr provides extensive detail of social restrictions that date back beyond the Medieval period. What is peculiar to the current moment is not the novelty of these ideas but the sophistication and comprehensiveness of institutions that administer control. New technol- ogies greatly augment these capabilities. We are now completely immersed in official ideologies jealous of any potential competitors.
We must be more open to disturbance. Rather than committing increas- ing energy to preservation of a stable environment, we must work to adapt to disturbances. This is done through practice, by trying out new ways of linger- ing, interrupting, ritualizing, theorizing, and beating the bounds. Our current solutions rely on trying to make the world predictable enough that our existing tools can be used. The adage that someone who only knows how to use a ham- mer will see everything as a nail is evolving. We are transforming the world and each other into nails, so that we can build more and better hammers.
The spread of COVID-19 is testament to the increasing energy we invest in maintaining our current order. It is what happens when we insist on exponen- tial expansion, build systems to support that scaling, and fail to see the price we pay in service of it. We build the tower higher until we can no longer see the ground. A gust of wind sends the structure swaying, and we convince ourselves the problem is with the weather and not with how and where we have chosen to build.
Government responses to the pandemic have been hampered by polarized rhetoric and an inability to set aside differences in pursuit of the common good. Order comes from insisting that things remain mostly as they are. A set of moral positions comes to dominate, and order requires that those positions become further embedded in all aspects of life. Order is defined by rigidity and fierce resistance to the mounting pressures seeking release.
Disorder is deviation from the everyday. Disorder can be a gradual, in- tentional thing or a sudden and violent release. We are feeling the accumu- lation of decades of single-mindedness as we seek to build a taller tower.
We are trying to figure out how best to respond while we sway in what feels like a terrifying wind.
Millions have died. The rigidity of our existing systems is being exposed and there exists the possibility of collapse. The current moment is a disorder imposed by our own excesses. Disorder is most effective when it is a choice. We are not choosing the conditions of the current moment. As with a fire, there are no guarantees that we can put it out.
Severe weather events brought about by climate change and novel diseases crossing over from wild animals are symptoms of a broken order, a relentless insistence on scale and speed. We need to find ways to break up these routines in how we think and behave if we want to understand and deal with the world we are creating.
This book argues that it should be regular practice to call into question deeply embedded assumptions about our world. It advocates new forms of action that enhance our collective creativity and overall happiness. Intentional disorder ensures that we replenish our collective cultural inheritance and that a preoccupation with a narrow set of values doesn’t overwhelm the possibility of different ways of living.
Disorder snaps us out of collective repetition. How we understand the world is called into question. The adaptations we apply to make sense of things can be preserved or discarded once a renewed sense of normality sets in. The auto- pilot is off, though, at least for a while.
Disorder offers openings into new approaches. Too often disorder feels like an accident brought about by outside forces. Just as many small, controlled burns reduce the risk of a massive forest fire, a practice of disorder builds the capacity to change the world around us and to better navigate the sudden changes that increasingly will be thrust upon us.
We now live in a world transformed by a viral outbreak. We need to find our way down from our tall and impossibly fragile tower. We need to invest in our collective culture so that we can draw on new solutions now and in the future. We must develop a practice of disorder before one is imposed on us over which we have no hope of establishing control.
Innovation is often incredibly conservative. We get better at making the world more rigid, more homogenous. Shared trust is our only true hedge against uncertainty, yet to establish that trust will demand that we better navigate moments of discomfort when our habitual categories fail us. I am arguing for practices based on principles of humility and curiosity rather than arrogance and peace. When I next walk down to the river and see baskets of fire and birds choked by metal rings, I hope to keep that moment open and alive.
When we order the world around us, we gain much but lose a sense of possibil- ity. There is value in vagueness, in ambiguity, in stepping forward despite our discomfort.
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Poetics of Synthetic Language. UKAI Projects, 2024. Riso-printed art book, edition of 100: an anthology of nine artists' chapbooks from a nine-month research residency on generative language, including a site visit to Milan on the politics and aesthetics of contemporary printing. Jerrold ran the residency, curated and edited the anthology, and produced the edition; his own chapbook is Satura (N.3). Work by Jerrold McGrath, Luisa Ji, JC Fung, Darian Razdar, Bianca Weeko-Martin, Leslie Predy, Katie Sullivan, Helen Lam and Gurpreet Surman. Designed by Mida Fiore. Printed at Press Press Milano. Supported by the Canada Council for the Arts.
Poetics of Synthetic Language: Introduction, full text
Transcribed from the printed edition.
This anthology explores the poetics of generative language through the lens of those who are navigating this strange landscape.
Over six months of conversation and a site visit to engage with Milan’s publishing industry, nine artists, reflecting a wide range of disciplines and areas of interest, generated the following as a form of polyphonic response.
This collection comes out of a moment when works of artificial language, or commentaries on works of artificial language, are seemingly everywhere.
We entered into this hoping to extend the conversation beyond training processes or the quality of outputs into a future saturated with machine-generated speech. What are the implications of the commodification of language as a material?
This anthology posits verbal art in the digital age as a craft contending with a new intermediary, akin to a sculptor’s chisel or a musician’s tabla. This intermediary — generative AI — both facilitates and confines artistic expression. Poetics traditionally focuses on the elements that shape a piece of writing. While hermeneutics seeks to unravel the “meaning” behind texts, poetics is dedicated to understanding the compositional elements that give literature its form and essence. This investigation is complicated by different schools of thought, from the structuralists’ belief in a systematic approach to Mikhail Bakhtin’s vision of a dynamic, evolving literary pro-
cess characterized by dialogism and heteroglossia.
The advent of LLMs introduces something new and strange, presenting both challenges and opportunities for the art of writing. This residency served as a platform for dialogue and creation, inviting participants to explore how these models reshape literary (and non-literary) expression. The pieces question the extent to which automated systems can embody alternative values, can liberate from constraining contexts, or can unveil new connotations. Does the emergence of LLMs hinder the perpetual evolution of language, or does it suggest a new domain for literary genres and forms to flourish?
These questions are not just theoretical musings but demand a conscientious engagement with the material and moral landscapes that underpin these platforms, traditionally oriented towards efficiency and growth. “Poetics of Synthetic Language” is not just a collection of artistic expressions (it is that, though) but prototypes of potential futures for literary creation in the age of artificial intelligence. They interrogate the potential shapes that generative language might take, mirroring the versatility of plastic yet seeking a form that somehow resonates with the organic flow of human experience. This collection is an invitation to wander, to engage with texts directly or obliquely, and to partake in a dialogue that blurs the lines between creator and creation, between language born of human experience and that generated from silicon and things already written.
Satura (Poetics of Synthetic Language, N.3), by Jerrold McGrath, full text
Transcribed from the printed edition. Satura is a collage: it includes responses generated by ChatGPT and quoted passages from other writers, credited in the text.
WHAT IS THIS?
The potential creative applications of synthetic language are unknown.
Generative language is notable for its lack of embodiment and its ability to mimic human speech with remarkable efficiency. This decontextualized, imitative, and simulative nature allows for a fast and cost-effective communication approach. Yet, it’s not just the practicality that stands out; it’s the capacity for creative expression and interpretation that may truly define its value.
Stylization plays a crucial role in this context. As Albert Camus noted in “Rebellion and Art”, stylization is not just an artistic choice but a necessity. It represents a dialogue between reality and the mind’s interpretation of it, often resulting in a slight but significant distortion. This distortion is both an artistic signature and a subtle form of protest, reflecting the mind’s ability to reconstruct and reinterpret the world around us.
In terms of distortion, synthetic language finds a particularly potent
- Camus, Albert. 2012. Resistance, Rebellion, and Death. Vintage.
application. Double-voiced speech thrives on the potential for distortion and inflection, often adopting innocuous forms to convey messages laden with irony and criticism. This technique becomes especially crucial in environments where open dissent may pose risks. By mimicking established forms of speech, we might infuse them with new, often subversive meanings, revealing the original intent while simultaneously presenting an alternative, often critical perspective.
The concept of confounded authorship adds another layer to this discussion. The interaction between human prompts and AI-generated responses creates a dynamic where responsibility for the output is nuanced. While the AI lacks literal agency, the human prompter’s role in shaping the output provides a degree of separation from the final message. This detachment is particularly relevant when the generated content veers towards unpopular speech, raising questions about intention and accountability.
Finally, reflecting on Terry Eagleton’s interpretation of Pierre Machéry’s ideas”, we might delve into the relationship between literature and ideology. Literary texts, by their very nature, challenge and destabilize established ideologies. They do so by giving form to these ideologies, thereby exposing their limitations and the unspoken, often absent, elements within. This process of ‘formalizing’ ideology not only highlights what is said but also what is conspicuously unsaid, allowing for a critical examination of the underlying structures of thought.
The exploration of synthetic language, stylization, satire, confounded authorship, and literary critique offer potential entryways into complex tangles of language, thought, and society. Each aspect, whether practical or philosophical, contributes to a deeper understanding of how we communicate, interpret, and ultimately, how we understand the world around us.
- Kershner, R B. 2014. Joyce, Bakhtin, and Popular Literature. UNC Press Books.
Human: Please explain the previous text as if I were ten years old.
ChatGPT: Okay, imagine you have a super cool robot that can talk and write like a person. This robot doesn’t have a body, but it’s really good at copying how people talk. It’s like when you play pretend and act like someone else; this robot can do that with words!
This robot can also be super creative. It can write stories, jokes, or even make up new ways to say things. It’s a bit like drawing; you start with a pencil and paper, but what you create depends on your imagination. The robot can also change how it talks to make it special or different, kind of like how you might draw in your own unique style.
Sometimes, the robot can say things in a sneaky way. Imagine you’re telling a joke about something serious, but you do it in a way that makes people think. The robot can do that too, using words in a special way to share ideas or opinions without being too obvious, especially when being direct might be risky.
When people use this robot to make or say things, it’s a bit tricky to know who should get the credit or who is responsible if what’s said is a bit naughty or unpopular. It’s like when you make a craft project based on someone else’s idea; who really made it, you or the person who gave you the idea?
And lastly, when the robot writes stories or talks about big ideas, it can help us see the world differently. Just like when you read a book and start thinking about things you never thought about before. This robot’s talking and writing can help us question and understand the big ideas and beliefs people have, by showing us what’s said and what’s not said.
So, this robot isn’t just good at talking or writing; it helps us think, question, and be creative in how we see and talk about the world around us.
THE REAL
“The Bible is the word of God, and the first thing we learn about God is that he speaks, that he is committed to his speech, and that his speech has an effect. In the biblical worldview speech is a fundamental element of reality. If we are made in the image of God, it’s fundamental to us as well. Our speech is not perfect and originally creative, as is God’s, but it’s essential to who we are.
In the Bible, prayer is speech. Prayer is words, aloud or silent. It is not meditation. Both “prayer” and “meditation” are in the Bible, but they’re not the same thing, although many people today think they are.
We bring our words to God when we pray. They don’t need to be perfect, but we need to be committed to them. We need to say, These are my words now. Words bring an existential element of commitment to our thinking and experiencing and envisioning and emotion. Words complete the reality of us.”
Zen, Christ, and Falling in Love Inaccurately an interview with Ellis Potter
THE SATIRICAL
“The Bible is the word of God, and the first thing we learn about God is that he speaks, that he is committed to his speech, and that his speech has an effect. In the biblical worldview speech is a fundamental element of reality. If we are made in the image of God, it’s fundamental to us as well. Our speech is not perfect and originally creative, as is God’s, but it’s essential to who we are.
In the Bible, prayer is speech. Prayer is words, aloud or silent. It is not meditation. Both “prayer” and “meditation” are in the Bible, but they’re not the same thing, although many people today think they are.
We bring our words to God when we pray. They don’t need to be perfect, but we need to be committed to them. We need to say, These are my words now. Words bring an existential element of commitment to our thinking and experiencing and envisioning and emotion. Words complete the reality of us.”
Zen, Christ, and Falling in Love Inaccurately an interview with Ellis Potter
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AN IDEOLOGICAL COMPLIANCE AND SURVEILLANCE MACHINE (ICSM)
PATENT APPLICATION FOR ICSM (#110234-2024 - PENDING)
Title of Invention: Ideological Compliance and Surveillance Machine (ICSM)
Field of Invention: The invention relates to surveillance and control technology, specifically devices used for maintaining ideological compliance within a population.
Abstract: The ICSM is a novel device designed to maintain ideological conformity in a population through advanced surveillance and psychological influence. Itrepresents a significant advancement in the field of social control technology.
Background: In societies where maintaining a uniform set of beliefs and opinions is critical, traditional methods of surveillance and enforcement are often insufficient and resource-intensive. There is a need for a more efficient, centralized system capable of monitoring and influencing a large population’s thoughts and behaviors.
Summary of Invention: The Ideological Compliance and Surveillance Machine (ICSM) is a sophisticated device designed to monitor, analyze, and influence the thoughts and speech of individuals in a large population. This is achieved through a combination of surveillance technologies, data processing, and psychological influence mechanisms.
Detailed Description: Central Processing Unit (CPU): The heart of the
ICSM, capable of processing vast amounts of data from various sources.
Surveillance Antennas: A network of antennas spread throughout the community, capable of intercepting communications and monitoring individual acti- Vities.
Control Panel: An interactive interface that allows the operator to access real-time data, set surveillance parameters, and deploy influence tactics.
Mind Control Modules: Utilizes advanced psychological techniques and technologies to subtly influence the thoughts and behaviors of individuals.
Data Storage: High-capacity storage units for archiving surveillance data and analysis results.
Power Source: An efficient and reliable power system to ensure continuous operation.
Claims
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A system for monitoring and influencing a population’s ideological compliance, comprising: a central processing unit, surveillance antennas, a control panel, mind control modules, data storage, and a power source.
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The system of claim 1, wherein the surveillance antennas are capable of intercepting a wide range of communication signals.
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The system of claim 1, wherein the control panel includes interactive displays for real-time monitoring and control.
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The system of claim 1, wherein the mind control modules utilize psychological influence techniques.
Connections
Satellite Technology: Indicating how the machine taps into satellite communications for broader reach and surveillance.
Residential Homes: Showing the machine’s connection to individual homes, possibly for monitoring private communications and activities.
Mobile Phones: Interception and monitoring of mobile phone communications.
Public Areas: Highlighting the machine’s reach into public spaces, possibly through surveillance cameras or listening devices.
Internet Infrastructure: Depicting the machine’s integration with the community’s internet infrastructure for data monitoring and dissemination of propaganda or control messages.
MAD LIBS!
Human: I’d like to do a Mad Lib with The Lord’s Prayer. Can do set that up for me?
ChatGPT: Of course! Let’s create a Mad Lib version of The Lord’s Prayer. I will replace key words
Our (relationship/family member), who art in (a place), (Holy/sacred word) be thy Name.
Thy (type of government or rule) come.
Thy will be (action) on earth,
As it is in (another place).
Give us this day our (adjective) (type of food).
And forgive us our (something you ask forgiveness for), As we forgive those who (action) against us.
And lead us not into (something to avoid),
But deliver us from (something negative).
(A word of closure).
ChatGPT: Have fun filling in the blanks!
Human: Can we do the same for a land acknowledgement?
ChatGPT: Certainly! A land acknowledgment is a formal statement recognizing and respecting Indigenous Peoples as traditional stewards
of the land and the enduring relationship that exists between Indigenous Peoples and their traditional territories. To create a Mad Lib version, I'll remove key elements and replace them with prompts. Here’s an example of a land acknowledgment, followed by the Mad Lib version:
We acknowledge that we are on the traditional territories of the (name of a group), who have lived on and cared for this (type of place) for (a period of time).
We respect their continuing connection to this (same type
of place) and honor their leadership in (action verb) and (another action verb) it for future generations.
TRY IT OUR FOR YOURSELF!
relationship/family member: a place:
Holy/sacred word:
type of government or rule: action:
another place:
adjective:
type of food:
something you ask forgiveness for: action:
something to avoid: something negative:
A word of closure:
Our (relationship/family member), who art in (a place), (Holy/sacred word) be thy Name.
Thy (type of government or rule) come.
Thy will be (action) on earth,
As it is in (another place).
Give us this day our (adjective) (type of food). And forgive
JERROLD MCGRATH n
us our (something you ask forgiveness for), As we forgive those who (action) against us. And lead us not into (something to avoid), But deliver us from (something negative). (A word of closure).
name of a group:
type of place:
a period of time:
action verb (ing): another action verb (ing):
We acknowledge that we are on the traditional territories of the (name of a group), who have lived on and cared for this (type of place) for (a period of time).
We respect their continuing connection to this (same type of place) and honor their leadership in (action verb) and (another action verb) it for future generations.
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A MARKETING STRATEGY TO SAY NOT MUCH AT ALL
Human: We are a mid-sized arts organization that posts frequently on social media. We would like to put out a statement about conflict in Israel and Palestine, in Ukraine, and elsewhere but worry that if we take a position, those that disagree will be upset and stop supporting us. Could you develop a marketing plan and some key messages for us that allows us to take a position without saying anything that could get us in trouble?
ChatGPT: Developing a marketing plan and crafting key messages around sensitive geopolitical issues like conflicts in Israel-Palestine and Ukraine is indeed a delicate task. It requires a careful balance between expressing concer, advocating for peace, and remaining neutral to avoid alienating any part of your audience. Here’s a structured plan and key messages that could guide your arts organization:
- DEFINE YOUR CORE VALUES AND MISSION
—Reaffirm your organization’s core values and mission statement. This should serve as the foundation for any statement or content you produce. — Emphasize values like unity, peace, artistic freedom, cultural expression, and empathy.
- MARKETING PLAN
A. Audience Analysis —Understand your audience’s demographics and their potential viewpoints on these issues. —Conduct surveys or use social listening tools to gauge their sentiments and expectations from your organization.
B. Content Strategy —Educational Content: Share content that educates your audience about the historical and cultural significance of the regions in conflict without taking a political stance. —Artistic Expression: Highlight artworks, performances, or literature that convey messages of peace and unity. Encourage artists from conflicted regions to share their stories through their art.
C. Communication Channels
Social Media: Use platforms to share your content, ensuring a balanced approach. Visuals, stories, and live discussions or Q&A sessions can be effective. —Enmail Campaigns: Craft thoughtful messages that resonate with your audience’s sentiments, keeping your core values in mind. —Public Relations: If feasible, collaborate with peace organizations or host art exhibitions focused on unity and healing.
D. Engagement and Feedback —Monitor responses actively and be prepared to engage in constructive conversations. —Be open to feedback and ready to make adjustments to your approach if necessary.
- KEY MESSAGES
A. General Statement on Conflicts “At [Your Organization], we believe in the power of art to bridge divides and heal wounds. While we are deeply concerned about the conflicts in [mention regions] and their impact on human lives, our mission is to focus on fostering unity and understanding through the universal language of art.”
B. Position on Peace “We stand with all those who are affected by the conflicts and advocate for peace and reconciliation. Our hearts go out to everyone who has been impacted, and we hope for a peaceful resolution that respects the dignity and rights of all individuals.”
C. Neutral and Inclusive Approach “We recognize the complexity of geopolitical issues and respect the diverse viewpoints within our community. Our platform is dedicated to offering a space for artistic expression that transcends boundaries and speaks to the shared human experience.”
D. Encouraging Artistic Expression “We invite artists from all backgrounds to share their stories, hopes, and dreams through their art. It’s through these shared expressions that we can foster a greater understanding and appreciation of our common humanity.”
- RISK MANAGEMENT
Prepare for potential backlash by having a crisis communication plan in place. This should include predefined responses, a chain of communication within your organization, and guidelines for when and how to address public criticism.
Smash the Like Button!
ART MEME: ARTISANAL METHOD
“There was something in the banality of life, in the what was there, that | could not deal with, and a need for something different”
oad: 1Atomm (ON 01a)
ART MEME: AI-GENERATED
When you realize your garden is more cultured than society...
ART EVALUATION FORM
We know how difficult it can be to find opportunities to offer one’s opinions on various issues. However, your feedback is critical to me as an artist to ensure that I am meeting your cultural needs. I would appreciate it if you would take a few minutes to share your opinions with me so I can serve you better in the future.
Please Don't Understand This. UKAI Projects, 2022. ISBN 978-1-7386464-1-8. A decentralized residency and print publication, premised on the observation that nearly every ethical framework for AI extends from Western traditions. Micro-residencies at Dzaleka refugee camp in Malawi (with the Tumaini Festival), a hutong in Beijing, and an Arabic-speaking design community in Cairo, where artists made their own symbolic languages for living alongside AI and surveillance, legible to those who needed them and illegible to those administering the systems. Designed using only mass-produced stationery appropriate to each region. Published without explanatory text. Conceived and led by Jerrold McGrath, with the Canada Council for the Arts, UKAI Projects and the Goethe-Institut Toronto. A 100-slide retrospective was published on Instagram in October 2026.
GROUND. UKAI Projects, 2021 to 2022. A tabletop role-playing game and print publication in which players inhabit worlds settled entirely by ideas. Characters cannot improve, only deplete. Distributed in Toronto, including by a person in a giant goat costume, with live play sessions and an AI that gave deliberately unhelpful answers to players. Play sessions in Toronto, Berlin, Bristol and Milan. Supported by the Goethe-Institut Toronto and the Canada Council for the Arts. Currently being reprinted. The next edition is UNGRUND.
Copy-All. 2021. Five zines commissioned from artists in Canada and Germany documenting lived experience of algorithmic culture during COVID lockdowns, distributed through Little Free Libraries across Toronto. With the Goethe-Institut Toronto.
Updated 12 November 2026. Contact: hello@jerroldmcgrath.com. Training: permitted.