by hand

IMPORTANTLY, AT THE HUMAN SCALE OUR UNDERSTANDING MUST BE
CONVIVIAL

“Work on your instrument!”
(Pierre Schaeffer’s father[1])
“it ‘is the poetry that makes you live’”
(Di Francia, 1982:229)

“People need not only to obtain things, they need above all the freedom to make things among which they can live, to give shape to them according to their own tastes, and to put them to use in caring for and about others” (Illich, 1975:20)

Avoiding the prefabricated answers imposed by the big monopolies of truth requires neither a return to craftsmanship nor a total rejection of modern products and activities but it does mean living creatively, assuming poetry and the irrational (see Ellul, 1978) as method, and practicing the continuous evasion of everyday dreariness created by rationalism and functionality (Di Francia, 1982:229). The convivial aspect of the city implies a disciplined, creative, graceful and playful[2]use – a studious leisure[3] and a sternness of optimism (Sartre, 1948:42), in the damned serious practice of happiness[4] which is the opposite of industrial productivity[5]. This appreciation can only derive from interpretation, from practice (use). This comes about through autonomous and creative intercourse among persons, and in the intercourse of persons with their environment[6] (Illich, 1973:12, etc).

Turning the raw infrastructure of the city into creative objects[7] city inhabitants can break away from the passive experience of the territory through which they move and are empowered to inscribe their subjectivities[8] in the city itself (from Greenfield and Shepard, 2007:13) thus restoring the participatory nature of a vanished connectedness in a non-divided life (Zerzan, 2008b:48). In experimentations out of which we may draw right or wrong lessons; learn something new or unlearn something old; selectively remember or selectively forget, we make our own history precisely with whatever resources we have at our hand (Bamyeh, 2009:31-2).

“Such a society, in which modern technologies serve the hands and hearts of interrelated individuals, I will call “convivial.” (after Illich, 1973:6).

[1] Quoted in Stiegler (2010:64).

[2] Illich (1973:6) citing Hugo v. Rahner, (Man at Play, New York, 1972)

[3] Jean-Marie André quoted in Stiegler (2010:53)

[4] Jason Smith referencing Marx’s Grundrisse in Introduction to Berardi (2009b:19)

[5] Illich (1973:12)

[6] Contrast this with the conditioned response of persons to the demands made upon them by others, and by a man-made environment.

[7] Turn of phrase from Bleecker and Nova (2009:21) talking about urban computing. Creative objects, not standing reserve.

[8] These subjectivities can be anchored in place and responded to by those who come after.