The Whole Earth Catalog,
started in 1968 by Stewart Brand
and published occasionally until
1998, can be seen as the archetype
of DIY cookbooks. It aimed to
be a comprehensive guide to the
methods and tools necessary for a
Communalist living. The content was
user-generated and the methods in the
catalogue were not just tools but parts
of larger processes to change the way
humans lived on “spaceship earth”.
It contained methods for everything
from cooking, house-building, medi-
cine and sex. The farewell message
placed on the back cover of the 1974
edition of the catalogue was:
“Stay hungry, stay foolish.”This philosophy of ‘acting in order to induce others to act’, of offering impulses rather
than instructions, and of cultivating an environment for change from within, starts on
the ground and often with small beginnings which have ‘emergent’ potential – a bus
stop, a pickle jar, a composting bin, a strandpipe [...]. (Hamdi 2004: xx)In this way an inspiring manual breaks up and opposes a situation of activity
substitution, what Slavoy Zizek and Robert Pfaller calls “interpassivity” (Zizek
1998, Pfaller 2003). Classically, this substitution has moved from historical “wail-
ers”, women hired to cry at funerals, to today’s “canned laughter” on TV (Zizek).
It is also a practice connected to technology, we act as the VCR “sees” movies for
us, the copying machine “reads” books for us, very much as how the Tibetan
prayer wheel “prays” for the believer when turned.
It is important to notice that interpassivity is not a question of people being
fooled by rituals or technologies, but instead how we on purpose lose action
spaces by delegating work to these services. We trade them action spaces for what
we consider a better deal. Heating up a ready-made soup makes us have time for
other things, but we also lose the possibility of learning to cook it. Our action
space in the kitchen converges into microwave heating.
This loss of action space is similar to what Dutch philosopher Henk Oosterling
calls “radical mediocrity” (Oosterling 2005). What is gained from using a word
processor compared to handwriting, for example the speed, spelling, and the aes-
thetic, is lost to uniformity and limited freedom as we cannot express individual
writing styles or write on the diagonal. Through interpassivity we give up our
field of activity to a pre-packaged one. We give up the cookbook’s inherent pos-
sibility to help us through kitchen emancipation for the seductive speed and pre-
dictability of the ready-made sauce.
In order to help us clarify the general difference of these ways through action
spaces I propose to divide methods into two polar formats. However sweeping
they might be I still think they can help us understand how manuals and instruc-
tions work, most forms of manuals exist in the grey scale in-between these.
On the one hand we have a form of the ”executable”. It is a process where the end
goal or result is most important. It is a ”double-click” performance that discharg-
es energy towards a specific task. It contains an explanation for the task – how it
is to be begun, conducted, executed, and completed. The executable is an inflex-
ible instruction where we can clearly see in the end if it was done ”right” or ac-
cording to a given command. It is a narrow passage through an action space.
However, two interpretations of an executable are never identical, if the process
was not purely mathematical, but executables are intended to produce identical
result. This is my perception of the IKEA shelf or the plastic model airplane.
On the other hand we have the ”instructable”. This is a form of show-and-tell, a
pedagogic tool for distributed Do-It-Yourself advice where the journey is most
important. It offers to teach something, a path opened into potentiality. It is
about learning to navigate in action space. This is where I ideally put the cook-
book.
Similarly we might need to understand ”skill” better. For me, skill is not only a
matter of ability but equally one of curiosity. Skill is in this sense something
more than a linear path forward, it is also about taking an inquisitive look at the
adjacent fields. In this sense, skill is the attentive search for perfection of the same
skill, by questioning, distance and reflection, similar to how science historian