to: ellipsis ...
from: jcj
22 July 1996
subject: letter twenty-two V
attachments: intersay 1
: some keys to the doors of perception
dear ellipsis ... and everyone
Dependingoneveryone ... Yes, this at last is the
moment (he types as he thinks) for Dr Bellamy's
utopia to be realised electrically and digitally
as a network ... and in this writing.
I don't yet know what I mean by that except that
this could be and is the start to what he has in
mind ... is this the moment when the Doctor is
going to return from the lab? His idea has been
sitting on the pages of Design studies since 1990
and it hasn't as far as I know provoked any
replies, but, now that there is this public
network to react through, I expect some of those
surfing will do something, and in any case I want
to try it in the virtual fictions of this text.
The first of these fictions is called 'Intersay
one' (it's also the first of today's attachments).
It is something I drafted last year with the
journal Futures in mind. But when I saw what it
had turned into, the kind of fiction that comes so
quickly to my fingers when I set myself to write
factually, I decided not to send it to the
journal.
The first piece I wrote about Utopia and Numeroso*
was rejected by Futures in 1981 and I didn't want
to risk subjecting those two fine characters to
that humiliation again. You will see if you read
it how they re-appear inside 'Intersay 1', along
with Unesco and Dr Bellamy, and how i2, the new
internet, is being brought into existence on
planet j-921 to realise the Bellamy dream.
The first part of this to materialise is Mavis, a
universal auntie of dis-education or de-schooling,
who is not a human person though she's more
popular with children than is any teacher known.
No one crawls unwillingly to her,** and that's
what all our new technologies and new systems
should be like.
The other attached text, 'Some keys to the doors
of perception', is something I sent to John
Thackara, who'd organised the conference. I was
provoked by the abstract language of media studies
and the like that I read in the conference
programme.
I don't like that academic way of writing and
speaking about something that is part of our own
extended selves, as Marshall McLuhan used to say,
and I always try to discuss such things in more
concrete words. Hence my attempt to resay abstract
theories in more colloquial language.
It was in protest against such abstractions, which
I can't help seeing as inhuman, that I first began
to write 'design plays'* in the place of
theoretical papers in 1971. And all this is what
that protest led to.
And on this hot and humid afternoon in July I must
now take a rest.
jcj