RELATED TERMS: Deictic Cascade; Diegetic Levels; Heterarchy; Metalepsis; Modes of Existence; Tangled Hierarchy and Strange Loop; Transgression
Designs enact deictic cascades that frame their actions, or their actantiality, their potential for action, in the theoretical language adopted here. In practice, such hierarchical cascades of deixis form strange loops and heterarchies, giving shape to the shared, common world as a social fiction or a social imaginary[1].
As ongoing constructions, social fictions and social imaginaries are not understood here as deficient or lacking in some sense. They are understood in a deconstructive sense as being both inventive and affirmative. In this context, designs are not simply objects (tautological things – ‘this is this’), statements (assertions or constatives – ‘this is a thing’), performatives, such as commanding or promising, although they could be taken as each or all of these kinds of example; they are also evocative. They evoke worlds as social imaginaries, both for participants in any given world-imaginary and observers of it.
Design practices, as cultural practices, involve cascades of deixis, similar to those found, for example, in drama. In drama, as Brandt (2016) explains, the first instance is the framing deixis of theatricality, or perhaps, more awkwardly, dramaticity or dramaturgicality: “I am now acting, and not behaving naturally”. The second instance is the narrative deixis: “I am now playing the role of a character in the story X”. The third instance is the aesthetic deixis: “I am shaping this role in a certain way and signing this version as ‘this way’ of playing it here now”.
The difficulty with design practices is that their cascade of deictic acts, as deictic framings, unlike, for example, those in drama, fine art or such performance media as dance, do not take place in a specific location or place, such as a theatre or gallery, to which one has to go in order to experience them. Since they take place in a range of situations, in the flow of ‘everyday life’, they may not be recognised as having a cascade of deictic acts by means of which their social and cultural meanings unfold. This may be because, unlike drama, fine art and dance, there is an expectation that designed phenomena have a straightforward instrumental function that exhausts their ‘meaning’. So, while designed phenomena may be recognised as what they ‘do’, their action is often understood solely as functional, instrumental, operational or ‘immediate’, that is, un-mediated.
The difficulty, in other words, is to open up the first instance of the framing deixis of the design, “I am now acting artificially or technically, not simply naturally, functionally, instrumentally or operationally”. This instance already assumes a theory of actantiality, wherein the design, in whatever form, whether symbol, object, technical artefact, service or environment, assumes a certain ‘agency’ in the networked or systemic situation being enacted. From there, one may begin to understand the further instances of deixis: “I am now playing the role of a character in the unfolding situation X in world Y”; and “I am shaping this role in a certain way and signing this version as ‘this way’ of playing it here and now”.
In understanding the instances of deixis, one may begin to grasp the modes of action in which the design is engaged, in addition to the assumed functional, instrumental or operational role. Furthermore, this opens up the notions of functionality, instrumentality and operationality to scrutiny, drawing out the cultural modes of action and the cultural assumptions on which they rely that are subsumed under those headings.
The discussion of deixis is valuable for design practices if it is tied into the discussion of levels of discursivity, especially in narrative discourse (diegetic levels), in relation to the implied modes of existence (or levels of existence), particularly if the focus is upon the potential transgressions, or metalepses, in the narratological sense, that may be effected through the designed instance: the appearance of a character or an entity from one level of discursivity or narration, and implied existence, in another level of discursivity or narration, and implied existence.
If the notion of levels is used, it should become clear fairly soon that any kind of hierarchy implied by the notion of level (higher or lower) will itself become problematic in design practices, as designs form strange loops or tangled hierarchies in which the top of the hierarchy becomes the bottom and vice versa, through the reflexive consciousness that the design provokes and engenders.
Such transgressions and strangenesses necessarily take place against a deictic centre, for example, a norm or an accepted reality, whose grounding, orientations and horizons and in whose person deixis ‘you’ are ‘now’ situated ‘here’, are overturned, so that ‘you’ are ‘now’ situated ‘there’, on other ‘grounds’. The participant in the design experiences both the deictic grounding and the transgressive overturning, as a passage and a disturbance which provokes learning, in the form of the questions raised for the participant, implied in the designed artefacts, by ‘now’ situating ‘you’ both ‘here’ and ‘there’ (or possibly situating ‘you’, ‘you’ and ‘you’, ‘here’, ‘here’ and ‘here’ and ‘there’, ‘there’ and ‘there’, and so on, indefinitely).
This highlights the complexity of the temporality, with (at least) three ‘nows’, and the spatiality, as a proliferation of ‘heres’ and ‘theres’, of the designed artefact achieved through the practices of deictic and indexical grounding and transgressing.
Notes
[1] It must also be said, taking into account the insights of Santos’ (2014, 2018) Epistemologies of the South approach, that at the same time as creating a common world with a deictic centre for those who are included and those who are accepted as belonging, such world-building or world-making simultaneously creates other worlds some of which are deemed marginal to the centre but also others that are deemed impossible or non-existent in terms that initial common world’s epistemology, ontology and axiology: they are unknowable, inexistent and valueless.
We must also heed Santos’ warning that the the processes that may enable to emerge all that is marginalised, obscured, obfuscated or rendered non-existent or impossible by this initial world-making will not occur without a struggle. This is where many of the so-called postmodern, post-humanist, posthuman and econarratological discourses come into play. These discourses are often dismissed as confused and confusing because they are seeking to develop what is called apophatic discourse, that is, a discourse that narrates or theorises from the position of the impossible and the non-existent, saying what cannot be said because what is said is impossible or inexistent – unknowable and unimaginable – from the focalisation of the initial world-building processes and their deictic centre.
Such discourses seek to engage a shifting of the deictic centre while acknowledging the starting coordinates, making statements of orientation complex operations of performative inauguration: bringing into existence. They are literally dis-orienting by intention as they endeavour to re-orient the initial deictic order and its centre and re-configure the socio-symbolic territory, skirting the accusation of uttering non-sense while still remaining meaningful and communicative.
Allan Parsons, edited November 2026
References
Brandt, P. A. (2016) Deixis – a semiotic mystery: Enunciation and reference, Cognitive Semiotics, 9(1), 1–10. doi: 10.1515/cogsem-2016-0001
Santos, B. de S.(2007) Beyond abyssal thinking: From global lines to ecologies of knowledges, Review (Fernand Braudel Center), 30(1), pp. 45–89. doi: 10.4324/9781315634876-14.
Santos, B. de S. (2014) Epistemologies of the South: Justice against epistemicide. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.
Santos, B. de S. (2018) The end of the cognitive empire: The Coming of age of epistemologies of the South. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
