to: ellipsis ...
from: jcj
1 June 1996
subject: letter one A
attachments: of all so many of us
: electric thoughts
dear Tom and Jonathan
Now is the time to tell you of the rough plan that
I have for these letters which are to be the main
part, or the spine, of this writing.
My first intention, which has guided the sequence
of texts to be attached, is to begin from the
'outerworld', the technology and the culture and
other people, and to progress towards the 'inner'.
After reaching this invisible region, perhaps at
the midpoint of the book, I expect to turn from
inner thoughts to outward. This change will I hope
provoke a creative jump of some kind, an awakening
from a dream, after which I can progress back
towards to outerworld, but with 'everything
changed'.
Thus the more factual texts, to do with the net
and the culture as it is, will appear in the early
letters while the more imaginary texts, to do with
the net and people as they can be, will appear in
the later ones.
In addition to this, and arising from it, I half
expect that some of the imaginary characters who
may inhabit the later letters (for instance,
Utopia and Numeroso) will observe the letters in
part one and respond to some of them. If that
happens the writing could become a conversation
between the real and the imaginary, or the present
and the future.
Utopia and Numeroso are, I believe, still on the
second earth (j-921) where I left them in 1991
among the other inhabitants of 'the electric book'
as I called it when that still unpublished work
began in '85. They reappeared in '92 (to animate
the imaginary preludes to the second edition of
Design methods) and I presume they then returned
to their imaginary planet, which I haven't visited
for years.
Now that an early version of the internet as we
call it has come into existence on earth (I'm
calling it i1*) I ask myself if the people on
j-921 have an equivalent computer network? I guess
that they are constructing a more advanced version
than ours and that is what I'm calling i2** or
Betaworld. To us it may seem like a virtual
internet, but to them it will seem as the real
thing while our i1 will, I expect, seem both
primitive and virtual.
So you see that in trying to 'plan without a
plan', or rather without being bound to fixity in
either past or future, I am getting into several
other fixes to do with 'how to write the book?'
Some of the unfinished texts attached to the
letters are the results of my failing to resolve
this ever-present question. But now, with this
'epistolary solution',*** I am hoping against hope
(and perhaps against all logic and reasonableness)
that my doubts will be resolved by 'someone else',
by the imaginary people who can now inhabit this
fiction.
What a hope, you might say, and the reasonable
doubting self who visits me each morning on waking
would agree. But for these twenty-five days I'm
not going to listen to him (or to her, for in the
ancient Chinese scheme of things reasonableness is
feminine and imagination is masculine). For the
duration of these letters I'm just going to let
things rip and I'll hope against hope that the
journey will be informative.
And, as for the result, I'm saying nothing. Though
what would please me most is that after this
journey through two worlds, both the experienced
and the imagined, we will come, you and I, to see
our selves and our circumstances in a very
different way. Better or worse I cannot say
(though the synopsis proposed despecialisation as
the only way to get better) but I expect to find a
kind of something in which either/or is not the
question.
So now to the attachments. The first is 'Of all so
many of us', which I wrote two years ago in
response to questions by C Thomas Mitchell. He has
since published a shortened version of it in his
book, New thinking in design, which I see as a
part of the movement to rethink the roles of all
the specialised professions. But, design being
more creative than specialised, Tom's
'conversations on theory and practice' are, I
think, of interest to everyone. And I thank him
here and now for provoking me to clarify what I
think and how I do when I try to 'make things
better by design' (if that is possible).
The second attachment is from the e-mail that you
sent me, Jonathan, in which you are musing about
the changes coming to some of us as we wrestle
with apparent difficulties in the transition from
book to net. I'm calling it 'Electric thoughts'.
with some pleasure and relief that the book is
flowing at long last
jcj