RELATED TERMS: Design, Narratives, Futures
Jean-Francois Lyotard (1984) contended that we were finished with grand narratives or master narratives or narratives of mastery. Nevertheless, in 2017, George Monbiot contended that the political history of the second half of the 20th century could be summarised as the conflict between its two great narratives: the stories told, first, by Keynesian social democracy and, afterwards, by neoliberalism.
Some years prior to Monbiot’s statement, Bruno Latour (2009) had declared that the present historical situation may be defined by a complete disconnect between two great alternative narratives. The first concerns emancipation, detachment, modernisation, progress and mastery. The other, concerns attachment, precaution, entanglement, dependence and care.
Latour evaluates the notion of ‘designing’ in the context of the contrast between these two alternative narratives. He suggests provocatively that ‘design’ is one of the terms that has replaced ‘revolution’. To say that everything has to be designed and redesigned, including nature, is to imply that it will neither be revolutionised nor modernised. “In other words, the more we think of ourselves as designers, the less we think of ourselves as modernizers” (Latour, 2009: 3).
It is the contradictions and paradoxes of this philosophical and anthropological position on design that need to be explored and developed.
References
Latour, B. (2009). A Cautious Prometheus? A few steps toward a philosophy of design (with special attention to Peter Sloterdijk ). In: Hackney, F., Glynne, J., and Minto, V., eds. Networks of design: proceedings of the 2008 Annual International Conference of the Design History Society. Boca Raton: Universal Publishers. Available from http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/112-DESIGN-CORNWALL-GB.pdf [Accessed 10 August 2012].
Lyotard, J.-F. (1984) The Postmodern condition: a report on knowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Monbiot, G. (2017). How do we get out of this mess? Guardian, 9 September. Available from https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/sep/09/george-monbiot-how-de-we-get-out-of-this-mess [Accessed 9 September 2017].
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