Abstract
In most circumstances, summoning a particular book into existence is the result of hard work by authors, editors, proofreaders, printers and so on. It might also be the act of will of a reader, browsing in a confusing bookshop, searching for something about a particularly recondite topic until a dusty volume falls from a high shelf, or nudges from behind a children’s encyclopedia. Another strategy might be to write a review of a book that doesn’t exist, and then wait patiently for it to appear, perhaps written by another hand, by another publisher. Books appear when they are needed.
This splendid reprint of Wilkins’ original Spanish 1966 edition (Buenos Aires: Borges Editores) is inspired by the continuing relevance of her ideas, particularly for the times we find ourselves in. As is widely known, this book emerged at a moment when South American politics was generating many speculations and experiments, a magical realism of literature, art and politics. She had an influence on Pablo Neruda, Frida Kahlo and the Zapatistas. Her move to Lancaster University in the 1970s was brief and sexually transformative, and (then) he soon returned to Argentina, after which little is known about him.
The central conceit of this very large volume is that it is a cookery book for organizers. Just like any comprehensive cookbook, it contains a series of sections for the different parts of a meal, ingredients for particular meals and a huge index for things to do with different ingredients. So you could go to the section for starters to decide what to cook to begin your meal, find a recipe for a particular dish that you fancy eating tonight, or decide what to cook with some stale bread and a large quantity of tomatoes. Ideally it would be a well-thumbed book with various indecipherable annotations (“more salt?”), fattened by various bookmarks with jotted notes, some pages gently stained with sauce, others sticking together.
Wilkins’ genius was to replace the food items and descriptions of different preparation processes with different elements of organization – “meetings,” hierarchy’, “accounting” and so on—as well as different sorts of organization—the traveling circus, the museum, the food truck. This is a book of extraordinary variety and richness that bursts from its 500 pages. (Further volumes were planned, but it is unclear whether they were ever written.) A reader could go to the section for “intentional communities” to see examples, opportunities and dangers of such an organizational form, find some inspiration for a particular business that they wanted to build or be part of, or decide what to make with some friends and a fascination with seaweed.
Of course this is not a business book, not a handbook of the 10 things to do to become a wealthy entrepreneur. It promises nothing but the opportunity to participate in making something, to experiment with our future. Wilkins was alleged to have been an influence on the Brazilian political and legal theorist and politician Roberto Unger (1998, 2004). Unger argued that all knowledge and practice is socially located, is not outside history, at the same time that he insists that it is not socially determined, and that there is no necessary logic to history, no path dependency that takes us toward good or bad outcomes. He thinks that the biggest danger is what he calls “false necessity,” the idea that the world has to take a certain shape because of some suggested laws of human nature and social change. His is an argument against any particular recipe, for any one answer, and for the collective development of the capacity to think in a way that exposes and perhaps even contradicts the formative contexts that we find ourselves in, and that imaginatively explores new ways of thinking about ourselves and our social relations.
Cookery books are books that document the results of experiments, of putting things together in ways that suit the budget and tastes of a cook. So, Wilkins claims, should organizing be an experimental practice, one that responds to local needs and possibilities, as well as the climate and ecological crises, and questions of inclusion and democracy. As Wilkins (1966/2021) puts it “Making the world involves making relations, tangling your organizing with humans who have less than you and others who have more, but also with the creatures of the jungle, the mountains and the pampas.” (p. 356).
Of course the standard anti-authoritarian objection to Wilkins’ book is that a cookery book is a set of instructions, and that its seductive tyranny betrays the fact that it orders you to do what it says. These are books that demand obedience, and punish those who don’t do as they are told. Anarchists are sensitive about such matters, often to the extent that they refuse to acknowledge that any form of organization is a set of rules, though sometimes without rulers (Wilson, 2014). This is an important issue, one that often damns the word “recipe” as if it was a synonym for blueprint, plan, instruction or demand. Indeed, Karakilic and Painter (2022) argue that this is the death of genuine creativity, of surprise, because any teleological models purify and control. They include the word “recipe” in their list of terms that imply a sort of managerial determinism, as if cookery books were fascist.
It’s odd that they hadn’t come across Wilkins’ work, or indeed thought about what people actually do with recipes when they want to cook something. It is clear enough that any particular recipe can be read in different ways. An inexperienced cook might assume that the instructions must be followed to the letter. A more experienced cook will probably feel comfortable substituting this for that, perhaps combining two recipes together, or even noting a technique about the cooking of a tortilla which can be used in the next meal they intend to make for friends. Alfred Schutz, the Austrian social phenomenologist, often used the metaphor of recipes or cookbooks to describe ways of dealing with social situations by using certain habits or assumptions (Schutz, 1964). This was picked up by Berger and Luckmann (1967) in The Social Construction of Reality who distinguished between simple and standardized recipes, the latter being understood in terms of Weberian rationalization. But cookbooks don’t work like that. They are sets of suggestions, inspirations, not demands. Much of social life, outside the oversight of the boss or the state, is composed of such simple recipes. In other words, if you are going to someone’s house for a dinner that they have cooked for you, take something to drink, flowers, or chocolates. You don’t have to do this, but it’s a good idea if you do. In Schutz’s usage, a recipe is more like a rule of thumb, an educated guess which relies on past experience, and will be revised if it proves not to be helpful.
For Wilkins, it makes sense to use recipes because they give us an idea what has, and hasn’t, worked in the past. Imagining that we couldn’t learn from other people who have faced similar problems is to suggest that we are the cleverest people who have ever lived, and can make the future without reference to the past. Against such self-importance, Wilkins proposes organizing as bricolage, not management science, cooking the future as a generous practice done with and for others. This is a book whose time has come, and a time that demands ideas like this. Pushing back against one best way of market managerialism is essential if human beings and their non-human familiars are to survive the next few centuries. As Wilkins says, developing imaginative, inclusive and low carbon ways to live is the only important task for those interested in organizing. Which is why we need this book to be written, and many others like it.
