Burning The Books

Notes from a day in Portslade with The Book. Began to work my way along Boundary rd, the main shopping area, in a long black coat, armed with my big red Book of Debts and flyers.

‘No-one owes me anything and I don’t owe anyone anything – that’s one advantage of being alone I guess. There you go.’

Note to self: The absence of debt as the absence of relationship to society? Do we need it? Though debt is often seen as something that binds one person to another /an institution in a negative way, it does perform the function of creating relationship. In earlier times this was seen as a positive way of guaranteeing interdependence and interconnectedness in ancient societies (See David Graeber’s ‘Debt: the first 5000 years’ for examples and brilliant thinking around this).

‘I’ll ask the boss’

I’ll put it on the bosses desk’

“I’ll hand it around and people might be interested’

‘I’ll take it home and have a look. This needs time to think about’

Note to self: Taking the mountain to Moses wasn’t always going to be easy.

One person looked so perplexed at what I was proposing (Does it cost anything?), their mouth literally dropped and they edged sideward to attract the attention of their co -worker, as if to point out the Crazy Person in the shop. But eventually they warmed and at least agreed to accept the flyer. I

Eventually, on about the 7^th pit stop, I came across someone who immediately and gleefully took to the project and put £100million in The Book – go to the bookmarks page on the website to read it! From this came an exchange on the difference between gratitude and indebtedness – because it was contributed as a debt of gratitude, and I wonder, is this a contradiction in terms?

A couple of people with access to computers or tablets in their shops went straight online and were intrigued… and I will be returning to the hair dressers who was very open and interested. I have to remember it’s early days and a lot can happen in three weeks.

I returned to Grate Fireplaces, who are very friendly and around the corner from Blank and whose front courtyard is the perfect place for the burning. Talk about sent from heaven theme-wise. Will know next Tuesday if this is confirmed. Patience.

Then returned to Blank and had in depth conversations around specific aspects of debt with a couple of members there, as situations had arisen that day which were on-subject and we compared notes. Can’t say much more.

Finally got access to the back end of the site and found a few debts waiting – very moving and so beautifully expressed. I remembered how it takes time and space and connection to contribute to something like this, and I have to allow for that and watch for which contexts work and which don’t, which is why I am in R+D. So far feedback on the site is positive… with a few changes to make and notes for future development already.

The Gertu turned up, who is an intern at Blank and on a Leonardo scholarship from Estonia and SO the perfect person to help support during these next few weeks. Very into exploring the subject, got the concept and seems very organized and tuned in, tapped on etc. Flyers start to go out properly at end of week, social media slowly starting, they have been working on de-bugging the site and so have been waiting til it’s in as fully functioning form as possible before sending it out widely.

This is the most exciting part of the work, when it starts to line up with the outside world, and you sense it creating its own relationship and opening up conversations in the everyday which wouldn’t have happened otherwise and go in unexpected directions.

ONLINE AND ON THE STREETS…

The Book of Debts is finally online! www.burningthebooks.co.uk . It felt like it would never happen…it’s still rough round the edges but this is an R+D period so that’s ok, we tell ourselves. I am looking forward to seeing whether it draws people in to contribute to the project, and what they make of it.

The physical Book of Debts is ready for action, with initial stories scribed in and a covering of in-the-red velvet to catch the eye on the streets of Portslade..

The Blank gallery is totally BLANK, and ready for minimal transformation . We have been discussing how to run the events planned on !!th and 18^th May and on friday Lex, who will be the fire-tenderer and assist me, came and we scoped out the possibilities of how to use the space.

We will hopefully get confirmation tomorrow of the outdoor site we found for the burning, which is a perfect match, more on that later. We will hopefully get confirmation tomorrow of the outdoor site we found on Friday for the burning, which is a perfect match, more on that later.

All event updates are on facebook.com/burningthebooks but I will also detail them here. I have even started a twitter account for the project

So, off we go then. Three weeks to fill the book and create a presence in a specific location as well as see how it lands online with people who know nothing of the project…

I got very excited to discover the other week that the seminal book Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth – written by and based on a lecture by writer Margaret Atwood – which was my initial reading companion when I was developing the original Burning the Books intervention in 2011 through Giving into Gift, has been made into a documentary film by director Jennifer Bachwal, which came out last year.

Here is the trailer, it was released in the US and Canada, (it’s available through the NFB) I am not sure when it comes out here. It’s poetic and powerful and features Atwood herself, intertwined with story strands around different aspects of debt in its many forms. Atwood was the one who opened up my thinking around debt as a metaphor and I am very grateful to her (or am I indebted?).

The stories – which are beautifully shot and the encounters sensitively and non-judgmentally handled – range from modern slavery in the tomato fields of Florida, criminal debt both within institutions (a state penitentiary in Pennsylvania) and within communities (blood debts in Northern Albania) to ecological debt on the oilfields of the Gulf coast and even an interview with Conrad Black, everyone’s favourite financial villain. It’s true to Atwood’s consideration of debt as a mental construct, and an opportunity for philosophical consideration of one’s own relationship to society, self and other, as mediated through debt in the form of ‘a social interaction – between two parties’.

I am aware the synchronicity of material like this coming out at this time, alongside all the other material mentioned before on this blog (Eisenstein,Graeber etc.). I don’t feel alone in trying to explore this mountain of a subject – in the minds of so many at the moment – with my humble teaspoon! Many people here are still not aware of extraordinary collective social actions like Strike Debt or the Rolling Jubilee initiative,. Most of this is coming out of the U.S (or Canada), I think they are ahead of us on the timeline because of the earlier impact of the financial crisis and elements like medical debt and student debt (which will begin to hit in the same way here soon). Also, I wonder is there something in the American psyche which is more at ease with public self disclosure /the confessional, or just angry/ desperate enough to have the courage to breaking the taboo of revealing personal financial and social fragility within the context of political action?

This project – rooted in the framework of a live art /work – references these, (though it was devised the year before they happened) but is different in a number of ways and tones. One of the main differences is that it is anonymous to participate in and this is vital to its hoped -for success. We are in the UK, exploring a subject that almost everyone finds it hard to go public about, so confidentiality is crucial. However I hope that there can still be a public dialogue around it that does open up notions of debt beyond the realm of the collective financial panic that a lot of us are in.

From my initial dialogues with some of the people who have contributed the first entries, it seems that just being asked the question around what they might owe or be owed – and what this might mean beyond the recounting of a figure, a number – and then having to articulate this and commit it to paper, created something new, a fresh consideration on what is perceived to be a deadening subject.

I’m aware that we are about to go live online with this project later this week and I will be setting up at Blank. I have no idea what the take -up of contributions to The Book of Debt will be, I must remember this is a period of Research and Development, from which there is going to be much to learn.

Dialogues with Maria Pattison (4)

On servant leadership (Part 2)

A: So how does that work within the business model, the capitalist model…?

M: Well, there is another interesting area of ethics around leadership, which is called leadership and self -deception. And there is training and thinking around how people interact with another person, for example, in business you know there was a lot of talk about how do you motivate people? But now, people talk about how you can’t motivate another person but you can demotivate them, so instead of trying to think about these carrot and stick ways of getting people to do things that you want them to do, or even deceiving them by saying its one thing and then its not, you know… I think that’s why people think that ‘ we are all in it together’ is a deceptive kind of slogan because we are not all in it together, equally So leadership and self-deception asks the question, always brings it back to the individual leader that says ‘What am I not seeing?’ and of course the way to find out what you’re not seeing or hearing is to ask.

A: Like ‘What’s my blind spot?

M: Yes, the spirit of enquiry, asking people and therefore respecting another. And I think that’s where the financial impact comes in because if people feel more valued and therefore more respected they will perform better. That’s why you can demotivate people by not doing this. I mean a lot of business models, although the talk is around human resources, I mean I actually think the term ‘human resources’ is vile. I mean a human is not a resource, a human is a human being, you know! So it’s how we change that that view of the value of a human being, and I think that’s where, everybody has blind spots about other people, their attitudes and judgments, their preconceptions about how another human being will behave, so moving away from that particular position into one of empowering other people by asking questions as opposed to telling them what to do, so the servant leader is placing themselves and their skills at the service of not just the org to make money but the people who are part of that organization to make money but also the people who are part of that organisation, whose lives and families depend on it..

A: Who’s an example?

M, Mandela and Gandhi

There is a really nice saying about Gandhi which I love which is that, he had a practice of meditating an hour everyday before he did anything as a leader and then he was asked what he did about his meditation if conflict broke out, could he afford the time to meditate? And he said ‘No, no what I do is, I meditate two hours a day…’

A: Yeah that totally makes sense, because you have to go deeper to know how to deal with it.

M: And so wisdom is a quality of servant leaders…

A: So…can you train people to be servant leaders, or is it something that is coming innately as a gift…you have to be quite self aware don’t you?

M: You do have to be quite self-aware yes, so you can train them to be much more self-aware. Jim Collins talks about level 5 leaders, says that there is always a seed in that person and you can’t train a level 4 leader, an executive to be a level 5 leader but you can awaken he seed of level 5 leadership. I think its probably seeded quite young in life, where values of generosity and compassion are ones that are part of somebody’s background.

Dialogues with Maria Pattison (3)

As i have been considering my role in relation the the Book of Debts (going live online and on the streets towards the end of next week) as servant, I was interested to hear Maria talking about servant leadership – perhaps the anti-thesis of the approach taken by the Thatcher, whose image I cannot seem to escape this week..(more on her later).

On Servant Leadership (Part 1)

M: So, servant leadership!it was a term that was coined by a guy in the 1970’s …Greenleaf. If you google his name you will come up with an Institute for Servant Leadership. He wrote that people who are servant leaders have the impulse to serve first and to lead second, whereas there are quite a lot of leaders who do use service as part of their leadership but the impulse would be the other way round, i.e. ‘first I want to lead and then serve’. So it’s about the impulse being first of all to serve others, and some of the qualities of servant leadership would be things like, humility; so if you speak to someone who is a genuine servant leader, probably if you say to them ‘How come you have become so successful?’ it’s likely that they would attribute their success to other people and to the times and just say ‘Well, I’m very lucky’. So those sorts of qualities come out.

The main thing also is that the service is for all human beings, so it’s not service just for a particular cause, the tendency is towards a much broader vision of humanity. But also, one of the ways of looking at leadership is that leaders are defined by characteristics and traits – so if you look down those kind of analyses, that’s only one way to look at leadership and its not necessarily the best one – but a lot of the traits that would be applied to a servant leader are also features of what’s called ‘Level 5 leadership’, which is a purely business piece of research done by this guy called Jim Collins in America. And he did some research into what makes a good company great, and the qualities of a company that can move from good to great usually have a leader at their helm who usually has great humility and who is not interested in their own ego and who can see the picture for a broader humanitarian cause, really, than just their own business as well. So it’s kind of interesting that those ways of leading have been shown to have a kind of economic success as well as a human impact.

A: And you said that model of leadership is faith based, so how. The guy who defined that models what was his belief system?

M: I don’t know how Greenleaf evolved it but if you look towards say the Christian model of leadership, it would be, you can see that a lot of the language in the New Testament is around putting oneself at the service of humanity, giving things up not piling things up .. and that has common thread swith Islam and certainly a sense to be inspiring of others, to work towards common goals. You know it’s quite interesting because a lot of Cameron’s Big Society, a lot of talk now around people all being in it together, that’s kind of the catchword

A: Yeah, apart from the people at the top.

M: Yeah exactly! So there is a lot of people seeing that these forms of leadership that aren’t just about charismatic men, leading from the front are ones that are actually really important in our world now, but how people really do it, the practice of it, that’s the issue.