creativity/machine

As avid blog-readers will know, I’ve been reading Ivan Illich’s Tools for Conviviality - a fascinating manifesto which, in the edition I’ve got, comes in a slim paperback volume bound in Revolution Red and lettered in stark bold type that is set on a provocative diagonal. It has occurred to me after reading various discussions of McKenzie Wark’s Hacker Manifesto (an earlier version is also available here) just how productive it is for me to read these two works alongside each other, particularly when reading them through the cool/uncool concepts our CSAA panel is currently grappling with as we shape our presentation/s.

Illich uses conviviality, not in the sense of a cosy afternoon of jocularity at the local pub, but in its classic sense:

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 manmade environment. I consider conviviality to be individual freedom realized in personal interdependence and, as such, an intrinsic ethical value.

Each of the authors proceeds from some kind of neo- or post-Marxist-inflected standpoint, and both are concerned with the ways in which power works in and through technologies of various kinds. It is understandable that Illich, writing in the late 1960s, sees computers as destructive of individual agency (but not only computers: like Wark, also compulsory education and the dominance of the managerial, or, for Wark, “vectoralist” class), whereas for Wark it is the privatization of information and representation that are the site of struggle. So thinking about how “coolness” gets in the way whenever I try to look at everyday agency in digital culture from a cultural studies point of view: on the bus on the way home this afternoon I started turning over the words “cool” and “warm” in my head - the “conviviality” that Illich speaks of exhudes premodern (or post-postmodern) human warmth, making it seem quaint in a way, but fundamentally imbued with positive, constructive energy; on the other hand, resistance is negative energy. Information work as “hacking” is equally energetic, but to my ears it is “cool” not only as in seductive and instantly usable, but also “cool” as in cold and counter-human. Of course, Wark is dealing with a different world from the late 1960s South America with which Illich was concerned: for Wark, the abstraction of private property must be countered with abstract creativity:

34. Through the application of abstraction, the hacker class produces the possibility of production, the possibility of making something of and with the world - and of living off the surplus produced by the application of abstraction to nature - to any nature. Through the production of new forms of abstraction, the hacker class produces the possibility of the future - not just ‘the’ future, but an infinite possible array of futures, the future itself as virtuality.

But I insist on wondering whether the effect of the aesthetic of the aphorism, the insistence on abstraction and virtuality in Wark’s work really function as he intends.

To take another, far more conventional, example, “social networks” is a cold concept - I have begun to doubt we can activate it in the service of any goal that has human agency at its core. Instead, I suggest we start talking about the ways in which human relationships and representations of self connect to and dynamically relate to each other as something warm: something like very much like seething, humid, leaky interbreeding human viruses.