I’ve recently re-worked some of my posts from here into publications made with bookleteer:
Hiding in Plain Sight – Read Online or Download PDF
A Calculation is Not a Judgement – Read Online or Download PDF
The Data Sublime & A Poetics of Data – Read Online or Download PDF
Daemons of the Shadow World – Read Online or Download PDF
View other publications i’ve made on bookleteer here.
*** a newer and updated version is available on bookleteer.com ***
When human judgement is drained from a system and reductionist rules are applied to complex situations, the results can lead to terrible injustices and harms. If we privilege the procedural outcomes of artificial systems over the importance of humanity, life and experience and the more-than-human world, we will likely face a self-reinforcing feedback loop of such effects, not unlike the existential threat of runaway climate change.
I wish to advance a proposition… a distinction. Namely, that there is a significant gulf between the mathematical operation by which a calculation can be arrived at, and the emergent process of evaluation by which a judgement is made. I think this is an important distinction for our times, because it describes the difference between a procedure of abstraction and a process of conscious deliberation. A calculation can be determined by a non-sentient entity following a series of steps to accomplish an end (such as an algorithm). Humans have created machines that can do this at scales and speeds far beyond our own individual capabilities. A judgement, however, requires a sentient being, imbued with consciousness and the capacity to exercise discernment and perception, to arrive at an authoritative opinion.
And time.
It takes time to absorb and reflect, to ruminate and pass judgement. What I hope to argue here is that consciousness itself is an irreducible constant fundamental to fair and trustworthy judgement.
I am, perhaps, re-treading old ground: the argument between quantitative and qualitative methods has rolled on for at least two centuries – rooted in the slow rise to dominance of a kind of scientism as the prevailing order of knowledge and worldview. Both methods have merits, and their integration or synthesis can lead to remarkable achievements. Both are rooted in very human beliefs and traditions of how knowledge comes about. Wielded together, they stimulate extraordinary benefits but, when asymmetrical in influence and power, the drawbacks are considerable.
We now live in a world where the quantitative has achieved ascendancy in almost all areas of life, where computations and automated decision-making affect the everyday lives of billions of people. Tremendous advantages in speed, efficiency and technical capabilities across the panoply of human activity have resulted. But they also amplify injustices and inequalities, or compound environmental and ecological over-exploitation and destruction. In doing so their scale and speed disempower and degrade the intrinsic agency of human beings in favour of inflexible and unfeeling systems. It is crucial to see that it is a deliberate choice to quantify and sort the world in this way, not an impartial effect of some immutable logic that cannot be challenged.
As Oscar Wilde might have framed the distinction, the difference is one of knowing “the price of everything and the value of nothing” (from The Picture of Dorian Gray). It is trivial to calculate the price of something according to a formula of tangible inputs and costs – yet far more elusive to judge its value. That demands a broader spectrum of parameters, such as context, emotion, culture and other intangibles. Our human fallibilities lead us to both extremes. Judgements, too, can be unsound. Intention and ethos determine how and why we adopt a particular trajectory – as much as our adherence to one method or another, one disciplinary process or another.
The predicaments outlined above are, I believe, at the very root of the proliferating existential dilemmas which humans, indeed all life, now face. The stabilities of our ways of living are being challenged everywhere by changes in natural forces we have clearly, recklessly, contributed to – possibly beyond our capability to re-balance, notwithstanding an irrevocable and devastating loss of biodiversity. I believe that the over-exploitation of the natural world, of other creatures and lifeforms has been facilitated by precisely the unfeeling calculation of systems based on abstracting life into discrete parts that can be separated from a complex whole and used indiscriminately without repercussion. It is a brutal and destructive alienation that does not factor in to its calculation of profit and loss the consequences and costs of its atomistic unravelling of mutual interdependence. It ignores the fundamental connectedness that unites all matter in the universe, the forces which bind all things together.
We see the results of this alienation across the planet in the systematic extraction of specific resources causing catastrophic loss of entire environments and ecologies surrounding them. There is no doubt that this can only persist for so long, and that this timeframe is rapidly collapsing in on itself.
We also see this alienation in the human sphere when bureaucratic systems over-emphasise adherence to rules above consideration of individual, or even collective, circumstances. One of the most appalling examples in recent years has been the terrible injustices and harms inflicted on the Windrush Generation by Theresa May and the UK Home Office’s “Hostile Environment” policy. Or the shocking percentages of automated administrative decisions in the benefits system being overturned on appeal. Or anecdotally from friends and family, in the number of long-established EU citizens resident in the UK seemingly routinely denied “settled status” on their first attempt using the government’s automated system.
And these are just the most visible examples of intentional applications of the technology of bureaucracy, and its component methods and tools, to harm the vulnerable. They are almost certainly intended more as a distraction, or sleight of hand, whilst other yet more egregious activities are kept in the shadows. It seems to me that much of this is being done as a climactic frenzy of industrial capitalism – to squeeze every last drop of advantage from a system that is so weighty with its own entropy that it cannot possibly endure indefinitely. Banking the last pennies to hedge against an uncertain future where, it is assumed, the wealthiest will command the most safety, luxury and authority.
But, I doubt it will go the way anyone currently anticipates. The speed of environmental and ecological transformation – which we are now experiencing as increasingly extreme climate impacts – is already confounding the most accurate models and projections that have been achieved so far, since none can reliably forecast the full range of interdependent, interwoven forces and factors we have interrupted with our industry and massive emissions of carbon into the atmosphere over the past few centuries.
I sincerely doubt the wisdom of focusing our civilisation’s faith too closely on systems that use automated, statistical calculation of probabilities to make future-facing decisions on our behalf, let alone in the here-and-now. It would itself be a further profound disconnection from our very humanity to hope that such technologies will ‘save’ us from the profound disconnection of the human from the more-than-human natural world. This has been gathering pace for hundreds of years, since at least the European ‘discovery’ of the Americas and the growth of modern industry and global capitalism. Our technologies are reflections of our cultures and societies, not simply neutral, inevitable outcomes of rational enquiry and engineering. They arise out of our cultures, beliefs, behaviours – they are value-driven… the products of choices, intentional or unconscious.
Evidence is growing (as documented by ProPublica among others) that demonstrates how algorithmic decision-making has a tendency to amplify existing biases leading to exacerbated injustices and inequalities, as well as other pernicious effects. Instead of the promise of impartiality that has justified an increasingly reliance on both bureaucracy and algorithmic systems, we have come to realise that they have all of our human fallibilities coded in, but with the additional twin enhancements of speed and scale – rippling the effects out further and faster. Now would be an apposite time to check the headlong rush to automate how we manage our societies and everyday lives, especially as we must shift our economies and industries from extractive and destructive activities to ones which preserve and maintain life and ecologies. The two are inextricably linked.
“… some are already engaged in experiments that try to make the possibility of a future that isn’t barbaric, now. Those who have chosen to desert, to flee this “dirty” economic. war, but who, in “fleeing, seek a weapon,” as Deleuze said. And seeking, here, means, in the first place, creating, creating a life “after economic growth,” a life that explores connections with new powers of acting, feeling, imagining, and thinking.”
Isabelle Stengers, In Catastrophic Times (2015)
Stuart and Hubert Dreyfus’ model of skill acquisition is a useful guide in discerning the distinction between a calculation and a judgement, through tracing the path from novice via advanced beginner, competent, proficient through to expert. It describes how, in the early stages, the novice must learn the rules and understand how to use them. As their experience grows (and presumably confidence in their ability to apply the ‘right’ skills), they rely less on formal analytical application of the rules and more on their intuitive knowledge of what will work best in the given situation.
“Dreyfus and Dreyfus’ essential point is to assert that analytical thinking and intuition are not two mutually conflicting ways of understanding or of making judgements. Rather they are seen to be complementary factors which work together but with growing importance centred on intuition when the skilled performer becomes more experienced. Highly experienced people seem to be able to recognise whole scenarios without decomposing the into elements or separate features.”
Mike Cooley, Architect or Bee? The Human Price of Technology (1980)
This model complements the four stages of competence (often attributed to Abraham Maslow), which describes the path from Unconscious incompetence via Conscious incompetence, then Conscious competence to Unconscious competence. Again, from a baseline of lack of ability, and even a lack of awareness of inability, there is a trajectory towards competency becoming innate. It becomes embodied not just in the mind, but absorbed into a whole sense of self such that the delivery of expertise is often described as the expert having an intuitive feeling for the right thing to do.
Experience then becomes the key to transcending the application of rigid rules-based approaches and developing craft, skills and expertise. It is also the domain of art and creative practices. What this amounts to, is another order of knowledge that Michael Polanyi called “tacit knowledge”. It is not the procedural, codifiable, step by step, “explicit knowledge” approach that calculation and computation are so excellent at, but something transmitted through experience itself so that the learner eventually acquires the ability to judge what is right to do. Not simply a linear problem-solving trajectory, but a holistic awareness of the whole problem or task. It is committed and informed, acquired by desire and often with passion and with care – a praxis established through dialogue and reciprocal exchange. Being relational, it is a foundation for cooperation and collaboration.
“While tacit knowledge can be possessed by itself, explicit knowledge must rely on being tacitly understood and applied. Hence all knowledge is either tacit or rooted in tacit knowledge. A wholly explicit knowledge is unthinkable.”
Michael Polanyi, Knowing and Being (1969)
The Judgement of Solomon (Hebrew Bible/Old Testament 1 Kings 3: 16-28) offers a classic example of wisdom in a judgement. It realises justice not through a direct procedure, but through what could be described as an irrational logical path. The story tells of King Solomon called to rule which of two women is the true mother of a baby, each claiming it as their own. No witnesses can say who the true mother is. With no other way to tell between them, Solomon’s perverse solution is to propose cutting the baby in half, dividing it equally between them. The story presents his wisdom as the insight that when one woman gives up her claim to save the life of the child, she is revealed as the true mother – concerned more for the child’s welfare than her own rights or sense of property.
The story is of a classic type that has parallels in the literatures and storytelling traditions of other cultures, like the tradition of Sufi teaching stories. Such stories illustrate how, sometimes, there is no rational path to truth or a just decision but, instead, an irrational, counter-intuitive approach can reveal it in unexpected ways. It is imaginative and transgressive, employing techniques familiar in creative, artistic practices – excessive, surreal and disturbing. These are not quantities but qualities of imagination. It may be perfectly possible to compose a fiction or a piece of music or an artwork to order, by following rules and formulae (for instance the ‘police procedural’ novel or many a three minute pop song). Yet something else is needed for it to become art or literature that transcends the skeleton of its construction and rises above hackneyed cliché and routine prosaicness. Our entire mode of existence and civilisation now hinges on dilemmas as, or even more, knotty and seemingly irreconcilable as the problem faced by Solomon. We are going to need the wisdom of irrational logics and unfettered imaginations to devise visionary, engaging and realistic ways to resolve them.
““Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom – poets, visionaries – realists of a larger reality.”
Ursula K. Le Guin, “Freedom” in Words Are My Matter (2016)
Fairness and trust are both qualities or conditions of human experience rather than fixed rules that can be applied indiscriminately. Neither are particularly amenable to formulaic measurement, indeed they are often critiqued precisely because they are almost impossible to quantify. In the context of automated algorithmic decision-making systems (e.g. in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning) this lack of fixity and highly subjective nature is frequently alluded to. The lack of stable frames of reference for what is at any one time fair, is a feature of its contingent nature. Likewise with trust – what constitutes the nature of trust in any given situation is highly contingent and almost impossible to codify into a stable matrix of elements and factors.
Yet we instinctively know what feels fair or unfair, and what trust feels like, as equally we know when it switches to distrust. Thus it appears that consciousness is also a necessary factor in experiencing fairness and trust, just as I reckon it is for arriving at a judgement. And, since feeling is such an important aspect of both fairness and trust, it could be that these two conditions, like our human intelligence, are bound up not only in the mind and thinking, but are co-located and co-created in our embodied experience of knowing. Perhaps neither are at all suitable for programmatic calculation.
What then, drives some to persist in trying to automate trust and fairness in an effort to remove the human from the loop in deciding what is fair or trustworthy? It seems perverse to me to be using such technologies to replace the human, instead of defining alternatives that could enhance our understanding and judgement by doing what computers and systems do best – classify, sort and order huge quantities of information to reveal patterns that are not immediately obvious. The analysis and calculation of data could then inform human-derived judgements that encompass broader contexts and situations including mitigating factors and contradictory states not suited to binary classifications. Better together, one might say.
The upshot of the successes of Deep Blue against Gary Kasparov in 1997 and AlphaGo against Lee Seedol in 2016 has been to invigorate both chess and go with new approaches and strategies, enhancing the potential and pleasure of the process of playing. The successes of these systems have not diminished either game, but suggested new possibilities. And here there may be a lesson in determining the difference between a sentient player with consciousness for whom the playing itself may be the point, and a procedural system wholly focused on achieving a finite goal: winning. By focussing on the objective of an end as the goal, those seeking to train “artificial intelligences” might be missing the fundamental point – and value – of playing; that is, the sensations it provides a sentient being of being alive and of existing in relation to something other than themself. A continuity of consciousness.
A deeper question to be addressed is cui bono? Who ultimately benefits from the increasing automation of aspects of our society? Just as the Industrial Revolution and factory production reduced the independence and skills of many craftspeople, so too the automation of everyday life is removing ordinary people from participating in decision-making. It places the definition of how parameters are set higher and higher within a social hierarchy increasingly isolated and removed from the experience of living among ordinary people. Such a rarefied extraction of authority without direct connection to context and situation also shrugs responsibility, and provides an effective insulation against culpability. Witness the degeneration of our politicians and political system – how lies, deceit and incompetence have become normalised, even venerated, without meaningful consequence.
I perceive there to be a parallel between the political imposition of strict rules and the mechanistic fallacy of atomising everything into discrete parts without perceiving the crucial balance of relations between them. They both ignore the basic truth of life that, while everything is indeed made up of the same elementary particles, their unique composition into the infinite variety of matter and life is absolutely particular. Local specificity is a feature of life’s mutability – how everything is in constant flux and adaptation in relation to its local context and environment. Scale seems to be a crucial issue here – universal laws function well at the atomic (micro) level and at the cosmic (macro), but clearly not so unambiguously at the meso scales we inhabit as lived reality. There, diversity and locality are contingent on achieving any effective equilibrium.
Complex living systems just don’t seem to obey laws and rules that are based on reductionist concepts. Perhaps at the micro and macro extremes it is possible for static rules to operate seamlessly, but in the elastic middle we need flow and dynamism. As atoms themselves are held together by the forces, or relations, between electrons, protons and neutrons, so all of matter and reality are bound by the multifarious forces and relations that govern the natures of different entities. To overlook the reality of our relational existence and to reduce everything down to inert and unconnected bits is, inevitably, to be missing a key part of a whole equation – a series of calculations that will never completely add up. Connection, interdependence, reciprocities are the fundamental forces that bind and make whole the matter of life.
We will need all of humanity’s diverse knowledges and skills, from poetry, art and music together with mathematics, physics and many others, to find the necessary paths to a fair future for all life on the planet. We shall need the ability to calculate and to build machines that can help us sort and make sense of vast amounts of data, whilst simultaneously we must retain our independent, fluent, human capability to judge – soundly – what decisions are most appropriate for each circumstance we encounter and must respond to.
The Uses of Not
Thirty spokes
meet in the hub.
Where the wheel isn’t
is where it’s useful.Hollowed out,
clay makes a pot.
Where the pot’s not,
is where it’s useful.Cut doors and windows
to make a room.
Where the room isn’t,
there’s room for you.So the profit in what is
is in the use of what isn’t.
Lao Tzu, from Tao Te Ching: a book about the way and the power of the way
(a new English version by Ursula K. Le Guin, 1997)
London, July 2019
“the important thing is not to offer any specific hope of betterment but, by offering an imagined but persuasive alternate reality, to dislodge my mind, and so the reader’s mind, from the lazy, timorous habit of thinking that the way we live now is the only way people can live. It is that inertia that allows the institutions of injustice to continue unquestioned.”
Ursula K. Le Guin, “A War without End”, in The Wave in the Mind (2004)
It has been the great privilege of my life to have been invited to visit and to share my skills and knowledge with the people of Reite village in Madang Province, Papua New Guinea. I’ve charted the arc of this journey in a series of posts since it got going back in 2009 with a request from my friend, James Leach, to help document the visit to London and the British Museum’s Ethnographic Department by two Reite Villagers, Porer Nombo and Pinbin Sisau. (Frédérik Lesage interviewed James in 2010 and wrote this up as a bookleteer case study.)
This journey has had the most profound effects on me, influencing life decisions and challenging all kinds of certainties I had acquired. Doubt, questioning and uncertainty have become even more powerful allies in the way I choose to live and, in the work I do. As an artist they have always been present, part of my critical and creative toolkit and way of life; but it is rare to have such an opportunity to experience ways of living that are diametrically different to our own. When an understanding of the true difference that exists becomes tangible within one’s own lived experience, it triggers a shift in both the centre and the orbits of one’s life. That re-orientation affects everything going forward – the sense of value and values, as well as rootedness in one’s own culture, purpose and activity. It has inspired my thinking with new revelations : providing me with a kind of double vision that offsets the familiar ever so slightly to suggest alternative perspectives and different priorities.
Elsewhere I have described this as helping me define a practice based on reciprocal entanglement: to create artworks which enable people to have empathic encounters. In the future, once the TKRN project reaches its conclusion (possibly in 2020), I hope to write up a more in depth reflection on what I have learned – for now it remains a fluid process that continues to draw me along, as currents around me shift and I do my best to be an agent for positive, transformational change whilst treading as lightly on the earth as needs must.
Since 2016 I have also been trying to develop a parallel project here in the UK (“Tacit Knowledges, Living Archives” or TKLA) that would be complementary to the TK Reite Notebooks (TKRN) project I’ve been working on in Papua New Guinea. It’s been a challenge that I’ve not yet cracked (in terms of funding or support), but I think the idea is too good to let go of and perhaps there are other ways it could find some sort of life. So I’m going to share it and see if it strikes any chords…
The tacit knowledges of how to make, shape, grow and harvest things and how to work with materials, tools, machines and other life-forms are acquired over time, with patience and perseverance. But in an age which increasingly values speed, automation and highly specific concepts of “efficiency” over human skill and judgement, what is our society in danger of losing, abandoning or simply disregarding?
Tacit and experiential knowledges are known to be at risk of loss in the face of automation, digital communications and data-driven decision making:
I believe that the processes and methods we have co-devised for the TKRN project could be equally adopted and adapted in our own communities in the UK – functioning as the kind of tools for conviviality described by Ivan Illich in his eponymous book: “People need new tools to work with rather than tools that “work” for them.”
This conviviality – the making and sharing together of value through stories, descriptions and other forms of practising knowledge – has been a key feature of how we have seen the TKRN tools become woven into Reite village life. It is not so much their status as artefacts which has made them valuable or that has given them meaning, as the social processes of making and sharing – enacting knowledge within and among each other. The books act as waymarkers to the people, or Living Archives, within whom and through their relations with others, the knowledge actually resides.
In his 1980 book, Architect or Bee?, Mike Cooley defines tacit knowledge as informal knowledge “acquired through doing, to ‘attending to’ things”. He goes on to say, “Knowledge frequently applied in a domain may become wisdom, and wisdom is the basis for positive action.” He also includes a diagram suggesting how he sees it operating on the axis of signal/noise and the path from data to action:
Consumer society is becoming ever more mediated in the relations people have with everyday skills and practices, for instance, through the easy purchase of ready-made things (‘reified knowledge’) that remove any need for learning skills or to take time to acquire tacit knowledge. It is visible in so many aspects of life, the vital to the trivial. From how computers can simulate the effects of what were previously distinct skills and expertise and make them manipulable by others; to the sophistication of ready meals at the supermarket, providing varieties of quick-cook cuisine that approximate culinary skills formerly acquired through time, trial and error – hard-won knowledge of materials, their interactions, chemistries and behaviours.
“It is easier to set in motion a galley or factory in which human beings are used to a minor part of their full capacity only, rather than create a world in which these human beings may fully develop. Those striving for power believe that a mechanised concept of human beings constitutes a simple way of realising their aspirations to power.”
Norbert Weiner, quoted in Architect or Bee? (Mike Cooley)
Automation has for centuries been used to exert power by one group of people over another. This has often taken the form of de-skilling artisans and skilled workers by capturing aspects of their craft and tacit knowledge and encoding it into machines – to replicate the work at scale and more cheaply. This was, of course, the prime struggle of the Industrial Revolution, resisted in its early period by the Luddites who sought to challenge their deliberate impoverishment and the removal of their independent craft practice. This is rather different to the way they have been typically and perjoratively portrayed as anti-science and technology. The parallel is also clear between the forcible movement by the ruling classes of poorer human beings into factory towns (and squalor, disease, exploitation etc) and their use of Acts of Parliament to enclose common land and sequester it for their own benefit – also leading to the physical eviction of local people from their ancestral homes. The 1217 Charter of the Forest had been one of the great legal impediments to enclosure in England, and a model for stewardship, but increasingly it was circumvented by individual Acts that removed common land from common ownership into the hands of the wealthy, by their agents (often relatives or dependents) in Parliament. In Scotland, the Clearances of the 19th Century followed a more direct suppression of the Highland clans’ way of life following the Battle of Culloden and the 1745 Jacobite Rising.
Such deliberate erasures of culture and creative or craft practices are now seen as tragedies, yet still counted as acceptable by those for whom the logic of ‘progress’ defaults to economic and monetary value over any other. A key aspect of resistance has been folk-culture and memory – losses memorialised in poetry and song, in banners and murals, stories and books, music and films. A counter-heritage that is intertwined with other pragmatic and political efforts, such as unionisation, cooperativism, mutualism and the social contract of the post-War Welfare State.
“The great thing about people is that they are sometimes disobedient. Most human development, technical, cultural and political, has depended on those movements which questioned, challenged and, where necessary, disobeyed the established order.”
Mike Cooley, Architect or Bee?
Automation is once again at the heart of the fears stoked by modern day fantasies of “Artificial Intelligence” automating away the ‘white-collar’ jobs of the middle class, who were protected from the job losses suffered by manual labourers and factory workers in the earlier stages of the machinic age and robotisation of manufacturing. ‘AI’, we are told by the frothy press and media, threatens to supplant all kinds of office jobs that were previously considered uniquely human and automation-proof. Conversely, a resurgence of interests in craft skills and practices over the past decade could be seen as a significant counterpoint to the growth of digital systems and simplicities and simulations of expertise that they offer. How can the benefits and drawbacks be balanced – to make sure that the benefits are more equitably distributed and not sequestered by the already powerful and wealthy? How can agency, good governance and equity be supported and promoted?
I believe that one way is to celebrate and share the tacit knowledges that people acquire over time and practice – valuing them and their skills, finding new articulations of value that are outside of mere quantification and accounting standards. In the 1930s and 1940s the visionary Mass Observation movement encouraged ordinary people to document and record their own lives and world – to create an “anthropology of ourselves”. In my own way, through the concept of Public Authoring that I have evolved through a variety of projects, places and technologies (e.g. Urban Tapestries, various Social Tapestries projects, and especially bookleteer) I hope I have made some contribution to the kinds of tools for conviviality that Illich speaks of, and which could contribute to a positive transformation in what we do, why and how we do it.
“People need not only to obtain things, they need above all the freedom to make things among which they can live, to give shape to them according to their own tastes, and to put them to use in caring for and about others.
…
I choose the term “conviviality” to designate the opposite of industrial productivity. I intend it to mean autonomous and creative intercourse among persons, and the intercourse of persons with their environment; and this in contrast with the conditioned response of persons to the demands made upon them by others, and by a man-made environment.”
Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (1973)
Through my decade-long collaboration with James Leach I have been introduced to a trove of ideas, observations and learning from the world of anthropology. One of the most signal has been my exposure to the work and thought of Tim Ingold (one of James’ teachers at Manchester and, later, a colleague at Aberdeen). Ingold writes of the ‘practice of knowing’ as opposed to the ‘property of knowledge’, and this has been like a pole star around which I have navigated my attention from the outputs we make using bookleteer (and other artefacts) to the processes that emerge around the making. As the TKRN project evolved, the discussions James and I had reflecting on the project became less concerned with understanding the individual value of the specific books that were being made by people in Reite, and more focused on how the books function as signposts, within wider social and cultural activity, to where knowledge might exist within persons and the relationships that connect them (to others, places etc). Our conversations have continued to examine how it is in the co-creative acts of reciprocal exchange – the relationships – that any ‘knowledge’ is constantly made, re-made and made meaningful. A co-discovery made in each act of teaching and learning, a dynamic act of reciprocity rather than the simple transmission of a static state of knowing something or how to do something.
“To tell is not to represent the world but to trace a path through it that others can follow.
…
It is in the art of storytelling, not in the power of classification, that the key to human knowledgeability – and therefore to culture – ultimately resides.”
Tim Ingold, “Stories Against Classification” in Kinship and Beyond (2009)
In a previous post I described how I came to appreciate differences between Western and non-Western worldviews and conceptions of ‘knowledge’ – how for some cultures knowledge is always relational, not something which can be alienated from context.
“Stories do not, as a rule, come with their meanings already attached, nor do they mean the same for different people. What they mean is rather something that listeners have to discover for themselves, by placing them in the context of their own life histories.”
Tim Ingold, “Stories Against Classification”
I describe my practice as storymaking, not storytelling because my role is not to be the storyteller, but the one who helps make the space for the story to be told. I see the potential for a cultural movement of enacting tacit knowledges through co-creative acts of making and sharing, as being a critical moment for us to reflect and re-assess what we value and why. At this turning point in human civilisation, when the speed of resource extraction, exploitation and consumption is poised to overwhelm nature and the ecologies that sustain our very existence, now is the moment to re-consider what matters to us.
There is an emerging field of studies that compare indigenous stories and traditions in different places and cultures with scientific evidence of environmental change (c.f. this example). Some studies have demonstrated a remarkable accuracy in the stories, for instance to within one generation of accuracy over a very long timespan (thousands of years) when describing phenomena such as sea level changes. Such studies underline the importance of storymaking and telling – as persistent modes of communicating knowledges that remain neither remote nor alienated from context – but instead proximate and directly relational to the people who live with and through them.
For TKLA to become a reality it would be necessary to form a network of people who have such knowledges and are willing and able to communicate what it means to them to have acquired them, why they think they are valuable and to whom they are or would be willing to pass on their knowledge. Methods would need to be devised for them to describe and share what they value about these skills rather than the skills themselves. Not to slavishly document skills in books that will gather dust on shelves, but to signpost these knowledge holders as “Living Archives” whom others can consult and learn from.
The format of the hybrid digital/physical books generated by bookleteer is highly adaptable to varying literacies (both linguistic and visual), allowing people to communicate in ways that are natural to them – whether in terms of words, drawings or pictures. They can also incorporate visual links to online sound or video files that can be played back on other devices. The books also underscore the importance of human relationships to knowledge – as distinct from treating it as an object that can be separated from context and meaning. The emphasis would be on documenting the value of each person’s knowledge, rather than trying to isolate and extract the knowledge as separate from the person.
These are some of the kinds of activities that I believe would be an important part of developing TKLA as a project:
The true measure here would be to work at depth, not scale.
I have no specific agenda, plan or framework to make this happen – it is simply something I feel is right for our times. I’m open to suggestions.
Giles & Katak after the Marpungae Singsing, May 2018
Giles Lane 
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