THE LEGACY OF RANULPH GLANVILLE: IS “CONTROVERSIAL” A GOOD THING OR BAD THING?

A free roaming scholar, Ranulph Glanville threaded his own interdisciplinary path. In Glanville (2000), he explores the limitations of the Western anthropological inclination for a control mindset in governance and management, as already suggested by the pioneers of the 1st-order cybernetics. He also makes a subtle distinction between his 2-nd order cybernetics (or: art and design) and politics that is typically taken for it by people who say that “design cannot be divorced from politics.” It comes to how variety is reduced: whether variety reduction attempts to be all-pervasive and permanent, or — temporary and personal, when variety is voluntarily given up in order to gain something else: the experience.


Variety is, indeed, a source of frustration, an error, for an engineer trying to get a device to work, a scientist with a theory, or a politician: variety makes the systems they try to control unmanageable. Yet, the very same thing, variety, is a positive thing in the eyes of a true artist: a source of creativity and inspiration. Glanville contrasts “the physical, the practical, the utilitarian” with the ephemeral and the aphoristic, pointing out how fast the former orientation becomes self-limiting.


While it is possible to lament that rational stepwise improvement is unsustainable and that we are not at all in control of things, one can instead delight in accepting that there are possibilities beyond those we can imagine — and seek them. By telling a person or a machine what to be, we are sure to miss on the possibilities that could have emerged otherwise. “A tool does what we want, but a medium “kicks back,” — Glanville concludes. The benefits are surprise, novelty, and serendipitous shock. “Metaphorically speaking, what I can see is not even the tip of the iceberg: and it may not, actually, be an iceberg at all.”


Reference: Glanville, R. (2000). The value of being unmanageable: variety and creativity in cyberspace. Netzwerke, Falter Verlag, Vienna, 303–321.