The Surface of Design – Ranciere [Footnotes] 

RELATED TERMS: Deutscher Werkbund; Distribution of the Sensible – Ranciere; Worldlessness #2: Worldlessness and Design

In the context of design practice, design theory and design history, the essay, ‘The Surface of Design’, by Jacques Ranciere is highly relevant. What interests Ranciere when he speaks of design is the way in which one sense of the word, that is, drawing lines, displaying words graphically or assembling surfaces, opens to another sense of design: the division and articulation of communal space.  

Ranciere is interested, that is to say, in the ways in which, by assembling words or forms, people define not merely various forms of art and design, such as drawings, poems and buildings, but also certain configurations of what can be seen, the visually perceptible, and what can be thought, the conceivable, two modes of the ‘sensible’, articulating forms of inhabiting the material world. This emphasis on the division and articulation of communal space, resonates, as previously noted in Distribution of the Sensible – Ranciere, with the design of narrative environments.

These configurations of the visible and the conceivable, as designs, are at once symbolic and material. They cross the boundaries among arts, genres and epochs and cut across the categories of autonomous histories of technique, art or politics. Ranciere broaches the question of how the practices of design and the idea of design, as they develop at the beginning of the 20th century, redefine the place of artistic activities in the set of practices that configure the shared material world. The examples he cites are the practices of:

creators of commodities, 

those who arrange them in shop windows or put their images in catalogues; 

constructors of buildings or posters, who construct ‘street furniture’, but also 

politicians who propose new forms of community around certain exemplary institutions, practices or facilities, for example, electricity or soviets. 

The path that he chooses to open up and pursue the question of design in the 20th century is to consider what resemblances there are between Stephane Mallarmé, a French Symbolist poet writing Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard in 1897, and Peter Behrens, German architect, engineer and designer who, ten years later, was in charge of designing the products, adverts and buildings of the electricity company AEG (Allgemeine Elektrizitdts Gesellschaft).

The contrast, he suggests, could be epitomised as one between two states of language. Design articulates a state of language that serves for communication, description and instruction. It is a use of speech that is analogous to the circulation of commodities and currency. Poetry, alternatively, articulates a state of language that transposes a fact of nature into its virtual vibratory near-disappearance so as to reveal the pure notion^[1]. As Mallarme (2007: 210-211) puts it, 

“As opposed to a denominative and representative function, as the crowd first treats it, speech, which is primarily dream and song, recovers, in the Poet’s hands, of necessity in an art devoted to fictions, its virtuality.”

Poetry effects a process whereby, “the object named is bathed in a brand new atmosphere.” (Mallarme, 2007: 211)

Although Behrens is involved in the mass production of utilitarian equipment, he also promotes a unified, functionalist vision: everything must be submitted to the same principle of unity, from the construction of the company’s workshops to its brand logo and its advertising. The objects produced are reduced to a certain number of ‘typical’ forms. His sense of ‘imparting style’ to the company’s output implies the application of a single principle both to the material artefacts and to the icons by means of which they are offered to the public. The objects and their images are denuded of any decorative prettiness, of anything that answers to the routines of buyers or sellers and what Behrens defines as their facile dreams of luxury and sensual pleasure. That is to say, they are stripped of what might be called bourgeois or petit-bourgeois aesthetics.

Behrens sought to reduce objects and icons to essential forms, geometrical motifs, streamlined curves. According to this principle, the design of objects should approximate as closely as possible to their function; and the design of the icons that represent them should approximate as closely as possible to the information they are supposed to provide about those objects. Thus, in a strict sense, products ‘function’ and icons ‘inform’. That is their respective modes of action which serve as the grounds for their respective meaningfulness.

So, Ranciere asks, what is there in common between Mallarme, the prince of Symbolist aesthetes, and Behrens, the engineer of large-scale utilitarian production devoid of petit-bourgeois aesthetics? Ranciere conjectures that there are two features in common between them. The first is the desire to form or shape ‘types’; and the second is the desire for those ‘types’ to form or shape communal life.

Types

Behrens counter-poses his streamlined, functional forms to the overly ornate forms or Gothic typographies that were in favour in Germany at the time. He calls these streamlined forms ‘types’. Ranciere explains that the pure, functional line combines three meanings: 

the graphic line, in the old classical privilege of drawing over colour; 

the product line, as distributed by the unit of the AEG brand for which Behrens works; and 

the assembly line, to which graphic line and the product line are destined.

Mallarme, too, proposes ‘types’. The object of his poetics is not so much the gathering of the words as the arrangement of them in the layout of a design. Every poem is a layout which abstracts a schematic from the spectacles of nature or of the contingencies of life and transforms them into essential forms. 

In this way, Mallarme sought to characterise world-events and world-schemes, not simply present spectacles or tell stories. Thus, every poem assumes a typical analogical form, for example, a fan flicked open and closed, foam that is fringed, hair that is displayed, smoke that clears. These are schemes of appearance and disappearance, presence and absence, unfolding and refolding. Mallarmé calls these schemes, as abridged, streamlined forms, ‘types’. 

Their principle lies in a graphic poetry conceived on analogy with the composition of motion in space based on a model provided by choreography: a certain idea of dance as a form of theatre where what is produced is not psychological characters but rather graphic shapes and ‘types’. In this way, dance is conceived by Mallarme as a writing of types, through gestures, that is more essential than a writing traced by a pen.

The poet, like the designer-engineer, seeks to oppose a language of streamlined form, a graphic language, to the ‘aesthetic’ consumption of resemblance and prettiness. If these ‘types’ must be substituted for the decorum of objects or stories, this is because the forms of the poem, like those of the object, are also forms of life.

Community

This brings us to the second commonality between poet and the engineer-designer. For both, ‘types’ outline the image of a certain physical community. 

Behrens’s work as a designer applies the principles of Werkbund, which sought to restore ‘style’ in the singular, as a means to counteract the proliferation of the plurality of styles bound up with capitalist, commodity anarchy. The Werkbund aspires to a correspondence between form and content: the form of the object should correspond, firstly, to its body and, secondly, to the function it is to perform.

It is this correspondence between the bodily form of objects and their function, and between their icons and their character, that is at the heart of the Behrens’ idea of ‘type’: types are the formative principles of a new communal life, where the material forms of existence are informed by a shared spiritual principle. Through the ‘type’, industrial form and artistic form are conjoined. The form of objects becomes a formative principle of life forms.

Ranciere contends that Mallarme’s types involve similar concerns. In the text on Villiers de Isle Adam where Mallarmé speaks of the ‘meaningless gesture of writing’ by which Mallarme means “recreating everything with reminiscences so as to prove that one is indeed where one should be.” This process of recreating everything with reminiscences is the principle of the quintessential poem. Ranciere contends that it is also the principle of graphics and the schematism of advertising.

For Mallarme, poetic labour is a labour of simplification. Similarly to designer-engineers, he dreams of an alphabet of essential forms, taken from the forms of nature and the social world. These creations of abridged forms, as reminiscences, answer to the need to construct an abode where people are at home. This concern resonates with the unity of form and content of an existence aimed at by the concept of style in Behrens: a ‘homeliness’ in the context of what might otherwise be the ‘unhomeliness’ of the industrial world.

Mallarmé’s world is a world of artefacts that represent such types, which must consecrate the human abode and prove that one is where one should be, at a time when such certainty was in doubt as the old pomp of religion and monarchy, the traditional forms of symbolisation of a shared grandeur, were vanishing. Mallarmé’s types, counter-posed to the eucharistic sacrifice, provide a pure gesture of the elevation and consecration of human artifice and human imagining as such.

Between Mallarmé, the pure poet, and Behrens, the functionalist engineer, then there exists this singular link with a double articulation: first, the same idea of streamlined forms or ‘abbreviated symbols’ as ‘types’; and, second, the same function attributed to these ‘types’: to define a new texture of communal existence.

The Mission

Commentators who study the birth of design and its relationship with industry and advertising wonder about the ambivalence of its forms and the dual personality of its inventors. Someone like Behrens, for example, appears first of all in the functional role of artistic advisor to the electricity company. His ‘art’ consists in designing objects that sell well and in constructing catalogues and posters that stimulate sales. Furthermore, he becomes a pioneer of the standardisation and rationalisation of work. 

At the same time, however, he places everything he does under the sign of a spiritual mission: providing society, through a rational form of labour process, manufactured products and design, with its spiritual unity. The simplicity of the product, its style corresponding to its function, is much more than a `brand image’: it is the mark of a spiritual unity that is to unify the community.

Behrens often refers to the 19th-century English writers and theoreticians associated with the Arts and Crafts movement who wished to reconcile art and industry by means of the decorative arts and the restoration of craft industry. To explain his work as an engineer-rationaliser, Behrens invokes the major figures in this movement, John Ruskin and William Morris. Yet in the middle of the nineteenth century these two elaborated a neo-Gothic reverie counter-posed to the world of industry, the ugliness of its products and the oppressive conditions of its workers. 

How, it is often asked, was this backward-looking, neo-Gothic, spiritualist ideology able to nurture in William Morris an idea of socialism and an activist socialist commitment grounded in social struggles? How, passing from England to Germany, was this idea able to become the modernist-functionalist ideology of the Werkbund and Bauhaus and, in the case of Behrens, the ideology of functional design-engineering, in the service of the specific ends of an industrial combine?

In response to this question, Ranciere looks for what the neo-Gothic reverie and the modernist-productivist principle have in common. He argues that it lies in the idea of the reconfiguration of a shared material world by working on its basic elements: the form of the objects of everyday life. This shared idea, Ranciere suggests, can be translated equally into:

a return to craft industry and socialism,

a Symbolist aesthetic and

industrial functionalism.

Neo-Gothicism and functionalism, Symbolism and industrialism, Ranciere argues, have the same enemy: they all denounce the relationship that obtains between the soulless production of the world of commodities and the simulated soul imparted to objects by their pseudo-artistic prettification.

It was, Ranciere reminds us, the neo-Gothics of Arts and Crafts who were the first to state certain principles subsequently adopted by the Bauhaus, such as, for example, that an armchair is primarily beautiful if it answers to its function; and, consequently, if its forms are streamlined and purified, thereby doing away with the tapestries containing foliage, little children and animals that constituted the ‘aesthetic’ decor of English petit-bourgeois existence. Something of this logic passes into the shared idea of the symbol in the senses attributed to it by Behrens, Mallarme and Ruskin.

Thus, a symbol becomes primarily an abbreviating sign which can be imbued with spirituality and given a soul; or, alternatively, be reduced to its function of simplifying form. Both have a common conceptual core authorising such moves. It was expressed by Albert Aurier who makes Gaugin’s La Vision du sermon a manifesto for symbolism in painting. The mystical peasant women iconised in abbreviated forms in that painting, which Aurier makes into neo-Platonic symbols, are also the Breton women in head-dresses and collars who featured as advertising icons on the boxes of Pont-Aven biscuits for almost a century. The same idea of the abbreviating symbol, the same idea of the type, unites the ideal form and the advertising icon.

There is thus, Ranciere argues, a shared conceptual core that authorises the shifts between the Symbolist arabesque and functional advertising symbolization. In similar fashion, poets or painters, Symbolists and industrial designers, make the symbol the abstract element shared by the thing, the form and its idea.

The same principles and the same thinkers of artistic form make it possible to theorise pictorial abstraction and functional design. Through a series of misunderstandings, these masters, like Alois Riegl with his theory of the organic ornament and Wilhelm Worringer with his theory of the abstract line, became theoretical guarantors of painting’s evolution into abstractionism: an art that expresses only the volition – the idea – of the artist, by means of symbols which are signs translating an internal necessity. However, Riegl’s and Worringer’s texts also served as the basis for developing an abbreviated language of design, where it was a question of constructing not a visual alphabet of pure signs, but on the contrary a motivated alphabet for the forms of everyday objects.

This community of principle between sign and form, between the form of art and the form of the everyday object, given concrete expression by the graphic design of the early twentieth century, allows Ranciere to reassess the dominant paradigms of the modernist autonomy of art and of the relationship between art forms and life forms.

Since Clement Greenberg, the paradigm of the flat surface has served to construct an ideal history of modernity. For example, painting is said to have abandoned the illusion of the third dimension, bound up with the mimetic constraint, to constitute the two-dimensional space of the canvas as its own space. The pictorial plane, thus conceived, exemplifies the modern autonomy of art, as each art practice is said to begin to exploit its own means, its own medium, its own materiality. 

Ranciere counters that scarcely had a Malevitch or a Kandinsky posited the principle of autonomy than an army of Dadaists and Futurists emerged, transforming the purity of the pictorial plane into its opposite: a surface for a melange of words and forms, art forms and mundane things. This process was repeated in the 1960s, when Pop Art emerged to overturn the regime of two-dimensional lyrical abstract painting and initiate a new, enduring confusion among art forms, the manipulation of purposeful objects and the circulation of commercial messages.

Ranciere argues that the lost paradise of autonomy never existed. Pictorial flatness was never synonymous with the autonomy of art. The flat surface was always a surface of communication where words and images slid into one another. Equally, the anti-mimetic revolution never signified renunciation of resemblance. Mimesis was the principle not of resemblance, but of a certain codification and distribution of resemblances. The mimetic order was based on the separation of the arts and their connection. Painting and poetry imitated each other, while keeping their distance from one another.

So the principle of the anti-mimetic aesthetic revolution is not ‘each to his own’ but, on the contrary, a principle of ‘each to everyone else’s’. Poetry no longer imitates painting; painting no longer imitates poetry. This means the abolition of the principle that allocated the place and means of each, separating the art of words from that of forms, temporal arts from spatial arts. It means the constitution of a shared surface in place of separate spheres of imitation.

When Ranciere talks of surface, he notes that it is to be understood in two senses. 

First of all, it is to be understood in the literal sense,  The community between the Symbolist poet and the industrial designer is made possible by the melanges of letters and forms effected by the Romantic renewal of typography, new techniques of engraving, or the development of poster art. 

Secondly, this surface of communication between the arts is as ideal as it is material. That is why the silent dancer, who unquestionably moves in the third dimension, can furnish Mallarme with the paradigm of a graphic ideal, ensuring the exchange between the arrangement of words and the layout of forms, between the phenomenon of speaking and that of outlining a space. From it will derive, in particular, the typographical-choreographic arrangement of Un coup de des, the manifesto of a poetry that has become a spatial art. 

The same thing is evident in painting: ‘pure’ painting and ‘impure’ painting alike are based on the same principles. The same idea of surface grounds the painting that puts expressive signs of ‘internal necessity’ on the ‘abstract’ canvas and the painting that mixes pure forms, newspaper extracts, metro tickets or clock cog-wheels. Pure’ painting and `corrupted’ painting are two configurations of an identical surface composed of shifts and melanges. This also means that there is not an autonomous art on the one hand and a heteronomous art on the other. 

The shared surface on which forms of painting simultaneously become autonomous and blend with words and things is also a surface common to art and non-art. The anti-mimetic, modern aesthetic break is a break with a regime of art in which imitations were simultaneously autonomous and heteronomous: they were autonomous in that they constituted a sphere of verbal or visual creations not subject to the criteria of utility or truth operative elsewhere; they were heteronomous in so far as they imitated in their particular order, notably through the separation and hierarchy of genres, the social distribution of position and worth. 

The modern aesthetic revolution effected a break with this dual principle: it is the abolition of the parallelism that aligned artistic hierarchies with social hierarchies; the assertion that everything is a subject for art – there are no noble or base subjects. 

However, the modern aesthetic revolution is also the abolition of the principle that separated the practices of imitation from the forms and objects of ordinary existence.

Accordingly, the surface of graphic design is three things: 

firstly, the equal footing on which everything lends itself to art; 

secondly, the surface of conversion where words, forms and things exchange roles; and 

thirdly, the surface of equivalence where the symbolic writing of forms equally lends itself to expressions of pure art and the schematisation of instrumental art, that is, to design.

There may be an implicit argument here that all design is ‘graphic’. This is the case in as far as all designed entities, whether artefacts, phenomena or events, incorporate ‘language’ or ‘words’. In other words, they are ‘scripted’ or are ‘inscriptions’, even if words are not explicitly visible. They are not, however, ‘prescriptions’. They permit improvisation and interpretation. The design, as object, is addressed to an interpretant who defines the character of the signification, which will in some respect involve words and language and other modes of semiosis as conceptualisation.

This ambivalence does not mark a capture of the artistic by the political. ‘Abbreviated forms’, that is to say symbols, are, in their very principle, both an aesthetic and a political division of a shared world: they outline the shape of a world without hierarchy where functions slide into one another. A world that, nevertheless, has boundaries that may divide not only in terms of centrality and marginality but also in terms of inclusion and exclusion, divisions that determine the existent and the non-existent, rendering the multiple spaces of ‘worldliness’ and ‘worldlessness’.

The finest illustration of this bringing together of the thing, the form and its idea, Ranciere suggests, might be the posters designed by Rodchenko for the aircraft company Dobrolet. The stylised forms of the aeroplane and the letters of the brand are combined in homogeneous geometrical forms.

However, this graphic homogeneity is also a homogeneity between the forms that serve to construct Suprematist paintings and those that serve to symbolise both the elan of Dobrolet aeroplanes and the dynamism of a new society. The same artist does abstract paintings and makes instrumental posters. In both cases, he is working in identical fashion to construct new forms of life. This is also the artist who uses the same principle of homogenisation by flatness for collages illustrating Mayakovsky’s texts and for off-centre photographs of gymnastic displays. In all these instances, the purity of art and the combination of its forms with forms of life go together.

This is the visual response to the theoretical question Ranciere posed. In that visual response, the Symbolist poet and the functionalist designer can be seen to confirm the shared character of their principle on one and the same surface.

Notes

[1] Ranciere is condensing Mallarme (2007: 210), when Mallarme says, “What good is the marvel of transposing a fact of nature into its vibratory near-disappearance according to the play of language, however: if it is not, in the absence of the cumbersomeness of a near or concrete reminder, the pure notion.”

References

Mallarme, S. (2007) Divagations. Translated by B. Johnson. Cambridge, MA: Bellknap Press.

Ranciere, J. (2007) The Surface of design, in The Future of the Image. London, UK: Verso, pp. 91–107.