RELATED TERMS: Design: Incomplete Conjectures
“The Wake, fin negans, begets only beginnings but invalidates all origins…” (Rabaté, 1984: 79)
In the understanding of design being constructed in the Incomplete … website, design can be grasped in four main modalities: as a set of professional practices, sub-divided by (industrial era and digital era) designed outputs; as academic discipline, partly organised by the divisions within professional practice but also open to potential inter-disciplinarity and trans-disciplinarity; as a major element of material cultural practices, or ‘the everyday’ and everyday interactions, perhaps even ‘the real’ as phenomenality; and as material public discourse, taking part in informing, teaching, governing and constituting publics as addressees, or ‘you’ as interpellant, respondent and inter-actant. The urban environment is saturated with the outputs of design practices which come together in various non-preconceived assemblages as material public culture. Design as academic (inter)discipline opens a space for reflection upon the relationship between design as professional practice and the public agency or actantiality of design assemblies or ecologies.
Through these assembled gatherings, a plethora of signifying configurations emerge in the urban environment, all seeking to constitute viewing and perhaps listening subjects-respondents from passers-by, making audience-interlocutors from publics. It has been suggested by Fordham (2007: 19) that James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake could be considered as an extreme imagining of this urban culture, one that is supersaturated with representations.
Finnegans Wake therefore becomes a time- and place-specific illustration-demonstration of what happens to thought, consciousness and self-consciousness when members of a public are addressed by and subjected to, “the constant barrage of capitalist commodity culture, with its adverts, posters, billboards, small-ads, personal-ads, programmes, news bulletins, websites, webcams, trash cans, soup cans, newsflashes, breaking news, gossip columns, bylines, headlines, catchphrases, celebrities, clothes and catwalks, bodies glimpsed, glossed over, and pored over.” This is a process that might be said to begin with Joyce’s Ulysses in its evocation of the character Leopold Bloom’s wandering through the streets of Dublin. In this scenario, “the field of culture is so dense, rich, inescapable, and thick a bog … that it overwhelms everyone near it” (Fordham, 2007: 19).
What is at stake for design as an academic discipline, given this scenario, is to address the ‘reality’ constituted through engagement with this manifest public culture and the role of design as professional practice in creating and sustaining it. It is a question of design axiology, how designs articulate and hierarchise values, and design ethics in its deontic, virtue and consequentialist aspects.
References
Fordham, F. (2007) Lots of fun at Finnegans Wake: unravelling universals. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Joyce, J. (1975) Finnegans Wake. London, UK: Faber & Faber.
Joyce, J. (2000) Ulysses [with an introduction by Declan Kiberd]. London, UK: Penguin Books.
Rabaté,J.-M. (1984) Lapsus ex machina, in Post-structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French, eds. Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer, trans. Elizabeth Guild. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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