The necessity of friction

nineteen essays on a vital force

Nordal Åkerman

Friction is what keeps us from realizing our goals. It is what compromises all our plans, sometimes making them unrecognizable. It defies our wish for perfection and constantly surprises us with new elements of resistance. It constitutes the divide between dream and reality. But friction is also that which gets us moving, a necessary incentive to achieve progress. Nothing can start if it cannot push off something else. By blocking or delaying the easy solution friction makes for a richer, more varied world. If it stops schemes from being completely fulfilled, it also stops them from going totally awry. To the modernist project with its one-sided rationalist pretensions, friction is unambiguously bad. And so it is being disposed of at an increasing speed. This means less and less time to pause and rethink, while the vulnerability of societies is aggravated. In "The Necessity of Friction" twenty scholars tackle this topical and important concept. A number of scientific fields are engaged: physics, philosophy, economics, architecture, organizational theory, artificial intelligence, and others. Together these contributions form the first modern-day attempt at analyzing the intriguing yet elusive subject of friction.