RADICAL TECHNOLOGY REVISITED

A conference Saturday 3rd September Bristol University Students Union

See web site:

www.radicaltechnology.org.

 The web site will tell you much of what happened. Here is a brief report:

REFLECTIONS ON RT 2.0

Peter Harper, May 2017

Now the dust has settled a bit…

We did it because we had decided to;  that is Godfrey Boyle, the Australian Chris Ryan and myself. It was a good three years or so ago, perhaps more. Can’t really remember.

We had little idea of what we really wanted, just a sense of an anniversary coming up and we ought to do something. Every time Chris came over from Australia we’d all meet and chew the fat. These occasions were fun, and rich with ideas and potential detail. I treated them like formal meetings, wrote notes and sometimes even issued ‘minutes’.  Perhaps mercifully, the notebooks containing the notes were lost on a continental train journey late in 2015.

However, some of the ‘minutes’ still exist electronically and you can see that what we were dreaming of in (say) 2014 did more or less occur. We had the advantage of a dummy run: a one-day conference called ‘AT@40’ held at the Architectural Association in 2012. Curiously, this was presaged by a very long discussion between Godfrey and myself, in the course of which we appeared to cover everything that subsequently transpired in the two conferences. This can be regarded as both reassuring (in that we touched all bases) and disappointing (in that the hoped-for surprises did not materialise).

A year before the anniversary we decided on a location (Bristol) and a date (May 2016). As in the Old Days, we felt it was wrong to simply do what we wanted.   It had to be democratic, collectivised.   Accordingly, we tried to assemble a steering committee, largely based around Bristol, with other groups in London and Wales. These attempts were unsuccessful. Occasionally meetings were well-attended, but usually were not. As Chris was (inevitably) in Australia most of the time, Godfrey and I announced meetings, circulated agendas, and were then joined by at most half a dozen others, often less. We are just two old gents and cannot raise storms like the Prosperos we once were.

Had I known that it was really ‘up to us’ I would probably have proceeded differently. But it was very hard to escape the mindset of collectivity: that it should be a largish group operating in a quasi-democratic fashion. As it was, we were vulnerable to being side-tracked by forceful friends. One of these was our old friend the eminent theorist Herbert Girardet, who (with less than a year to go) urged that we should be ‘thinking big’;  that this single conference could help swing the world round to more sustainable paths. Gosh! Godfrey and I had been thinking in terms of a geeky, ‘taking stock’, rather academic, affair without pretensions. Herbie is very well connected (Club of Rome etc.) and undertook to procure some big names that would draw media attention.

The assumption that Herbie was now an active part of the steering committee substantially influenced the sense we had of how ambitious things could be. It expanded the conference to three days, and certainly influenced the choice of venue. We decided that part of the conference could be a public debate with nationally-known figures, and the rest would gain traction and participants from this. We’d had provisional acceptances from both George Monbiot and Satish Kumar (whom we know personally), and planned a terrific set piece debate on Is Small Still Beautiful? with sparks flying everywhere. But as time went by they both sent their apologies; Herbie’s many requests were also turned down. So, in the end our Centrepiece public debate was simply people who are excellent but not famous, and with a worthy rather than storm-raising theme (Community Energy). Sic transit….

Having committed ourselves to a venue and a three-day conference, we moved the date from May to September to give us more time. It was a date that, unknown to us, turned out to clash with many other events such as the Green Party conference, the ‘Uncivilisation’ gathering (taking most of the thoughtful and active Yoof) and a whole conference devoted to Community Energy. This circumstance deprived us of many of our potential ‘stars’ and their clashing views.

But we mustn’t grumble, we had good fortune as well as ill. On the whole, it was successful enough and the triumvirate has ticked its self-inflicted box. There’s a web site with a great deal of historically-valuable material, already being perused by the interested. It has catalysed many debates, and will doubtless continue to do so. It flagged up the ‘alternative technology’ stream as a significant part of the history of science and history of radical thought. It was probably a last chance for many of the originals and contemporaries to see each other. It sets down a public record of, or leads to, many half-forgotten resources. I’d almost do it again.

It was in many ways what we were originally aiming at, although I must confess I had an expectation of more conflict. I had half-hoped this would be achieved by clever ambiguity in the programming, attracting elements that mutually repel. I thought we would be able to entice academics to deliver scholarly papers, and at the same time attract de-modernisation activists, of the kind that we ourselves once were. These species normally never encounter each other, but I thought we could force them together in some cyclotronic fashion and observe the showers of new conceptual particles that emerged.

This failed. Academics were present in plenty, but not to deliver serious papers or advance their careers. Of the anarchistic Young Turks there were few, if any. Despite occasional eruptions of old fashioned political correctness, most sessions were conducted in a spirit of nostalgic bonhomie.

Could it be done again, in some other way? Unlikely, but still an option. Now we have done our ‘retrospective’ bit, it might be possible to organise something that will attract genuine scholarly interest. We will not be tempted by megalomanic visions. If we played it right we might yet be able to get scholars and activists together, even without the legerdemain. Personally I can see better the kinds of people that would make this work, and how it could be done.

But I will let more dust settle first.