to: ellipsis ...
from: jcj
18 July 1996
subject: letter eighteen R
attachments: purposive drift (from richard oliver)
: industrial living as a frozen dream
dear ...
By now you may be wondering where all this is
leading to, and indeed I am myself. I am asking
myself if the book is going to be coherent at all
and I have been fearing that I cannot complete it
in the time, or even ever, if it doesn't become
more intuitive.
I think that I've spent too long considering
things as they are and I long to be writing about
how they could be, if only the culture (and that
means you and I and everyone) were in some
essential way 'different'. But I see so many
obstacles to any such change, both in myself and
in others, that I am beginning to despair.
And the main obstacle is that in order to say
anything that is consistent with the cultural
change that I have in mind I have to leave
altogether the teacherly mode of 'telling readers
what to think', because that is to be 'speaking
from the commanding centre', which is to
contradict by my manner of writing what it is I
want to say ... Oh dear, I know this dilemma so well
but each time it presents itself I feel as baffled
as ever I did and no rational way of thinking is
ever able to show the way. All I do is to write
notes upon notes to myself, day after day, some of
which you have seen already, but none of them
releases any flow or brings the smile that tells
me 'this is it'. I need of course to make a jump,
what they used to call the creative leap, but as
this requires a trust in nothingness, or in 'the
unknown', while at the same time remaining
grounded in well-informed judgement about what can
or cannot work ... It's no use complaining, I know,
but I feel that there is something in the machine
culture, some extraordinary diminishment of mind,
that makes any thought about its limits turn into
condemnation of oneself, and hence loss of that
confidence that is the necessity in all this ...
What I'm looking for is technology2, of
course, and with it culture2 and people2, and
everything2 ... and that's why it sounds so
impossible. Looking back to 'This is', the
attachment to letter four, I realise that I
shouldn't be panicking, but I am panicking, and
nothing seems to help.
Just when all this came to a climax and a
friend who tried to help me was reduced to the
same despair by my resistance to all suggestions,
I decided to turn from trying any more. And then I
realised that in all this worry I had not checked
my e-mail box for several days. And when I looked
I found a long piece from Richard Oliver who wants
to know what I think about what he calls
'purposive drift', which I gather is a way of
proceeding with looser aims than is normal in
industrial culture, looking more to the
maintaining of the process itself than to the
results it may bring. And, besides this, Richard
wanted to know if I approved of the use he had
made of something I wrote myself about fifteen
years ago.
As soon as I saw his phrase 'purposive drift'
I felt that here is my rescue. Surely that is
exactly what I need: to loosen my aims and cease
thinking about the result (this book to be
completed in only eight days, and in a manner that
is not self-contradictory). Instead I should look
only to 'the drift' of the many bits and pieces
that I have written during the year and in the
manner of 'Capability' Brown's question, I should
ask, 'what is the capability of these pieces?'*
That gave me the clue, the one that led to the
writing of these letters with as much confidence
as I needed. For I saw immediately that the 'piece
of land' that I am trying here to cultivate is
just those bits and pieces that I've been writing
rather blindly during the year and it is to those,
not to my aims and wishes, that I should look to
find the way. What are they capable of, and what
are they not?
And then I looked at Richard's quotation from
my book designing designing (previously called
Essays in design):
When you go to process, you lose the goal, you
lose the aim.
I'm beginning to see it now ... there are two
kinds of purposes ... the purpose of having a
result, something that exists after the process
has stopped, and does not exist until it has
stopped ... and there is the purpose of carrying on,
of keeping the process going, just as one may
breathe so as to continue breathing? ... the purpose
is to carry on.
How could I have forgotten this, one of the
main pieces of learning in my life? I suppose
because it is so difficult to enact in this
goal-oriented culture, and particularly when, as
now, I am trying to keep to a promised deadline.
So, this quotation gave me much the same
message: forget goals, and all such externals, for
the process itself. Just aim to sustain and to
enjoy the act of writing. And this I'm doing at
the moment, after days and weeks of writing
nothing but notes that led nowhere.
But now, says the suspicious voice of reason
(is that Edwina?), what is this? You're telling us
that for weeks you've written nothing, but what
about the preceding seventeen daily letters? When
did you write those?
Well here I must admit to a deceit without
which I could not have written them. As I write
now, on 18 July, only two letters have been
written, this one and the preliminary letter dated
30 June. I wrote both of them this evening. And I
intend to write letters 1 to 17 whenever I can, in
virtual time if I may call it that, while
proceeding to write letters 19 to 25 on the
respective calendar days of this month. Only with
this trick of mixing up virtual time with
geographic could I see my way round the obstacle
that has been keeping me so unhappy and so
unproductive over the last few weeks.
And anyway, I say to myself in partial
justification, geographic time is the worst of
inventions, and the most unreal of fictions, if
you consider how it fails to accommodate the
rhythms of the body or the mind.* So I'm not
apologising for this deception, nor am I worrying
about it invalidating what I say. I don't think it
does. Virtual time is what we need, I say to
myself now, and I shall look forward in the future
to other opportunities to enjoy its flexibilities.
Deadlines indeed, it's lifelines we want and
lifetimes we've got. So let's make the best of it
and 'have a good time' in the process. And I hope
I will still be feeling happy about this when I
wake in the morning. If I'm driven to any other
seeming deceptions I promise to say where and when
they occur, for despite my dislike of rules and
laws and regulations I'm by habit completely
obedient to every kind of public morality and
'cannot bear to tell a lie'.
And now at this point in this story, which I'm
largely concocting as it goes, I must admit to
something else. I have for several months planned
to have a turning point in the book and this is
it. It comes about in this very sentence as Utopia
and Numeroso appear here on earth in London, late
on the evening on 18 July, as I type here at the
keyboard. Oh yes, says Utopia, invisibly guiding
my fingers, we are waiting for you in the text
attached. If you touch these words* you will
wake up from the unreality of a sleeping culture,
you can waken to a life in which you're no longer
a consumer but one of the people in control.
But don't jump to any power-dream or fantasy,
says Numeroso. What we're inviting you to become
is simply one of the many, one of the every if you
like, the first generation on this earth to share
in equal power. And with the right use of the
network.
And now, to any reader who didn't jump, didn't
touch those magic words, into the prospect so
abstractly described by U and N, I wish a warm
goodnight. And I hope you'll join me in this story
in the morning.
jcj