About

“The world of design is like a highway, where each and every driver is asleep at the wheel.” (Golembiewski, 2016)

“Yet he [Heidegger] gave the right indication with the motto of his Gesamtausgabe: “Paths – not works.” The thinker’s writings are open attempts. Even the most finished products like Being and Time remained incomplete.” (Trawny, 2015)

What unfolds, incompletely, in these web pages, this net-work of posts, this postal communication, is an approach to the philosophy of design, one which offers a wide ‘context window’ for the study of design. More narrowly, it offers a flexible methodology for design practices in the form of ‘the design of narrative environments’.

This approach seeks to take into account the complex, recursive and co-generative relationships among the four postulated ‘dimensions’ of design. The first is design as a field of professional practices. The second is design as a set of interdisciplinary, or possibly transdisciplinary, academic practices. The third is design as a major element of everyday social practices, in which designed entities become everyday ‘things’, ‘values’ and places. The fourth is design as a major element in material public discourses, which emerge through the enactive realisation of designed ‘things’, ‘values’ and places as discursive.

Apart from the pleasure of doing so, the reason for pursuing these lines of thought is that, as Sless (2002) says, “‘designing philosophy’ (in the full ambiguity that the phrase implies) may well be one of the most important aspects of intellectual life in the 21st Century.” As noted in the post Design and Philosophy, the design philosophy being pursued within these web pages may be expressed gnomically as:

Design supplements;
Design is Dasein;
Design designs.

To this list might be added, somewhat cryptically,

Design incompletes …;

All of these acts taken together form an ongoing cycle that develops iteratively and recursively.

These four moments or topological dimensions of understanding design (as professional practice, academic (trans)discipline, agential-consequential entity – or actant – in social practice and element of material discursive practice) do not necessarily sit easily together and perhaps are not readily compatible. They mark a passage from the concrete specificity of design-for-production, that is, specific purposeful action with financial, economic and cultural opportunities, risks and constraints, to designs as what is simply ‘there’ ^[1], the differential givens of urban and rural environments, the seemingly ‘passive’, ‘inactive’ or ‘inert’ surroundings of the world around us: the circumverse in Tiqqun’s (2010) expression.

However, as discussed in this ‘net-work’, what is seemingly simply ‘there’ is highly active in ‘grounding’ and ‘orienting’ ongoing social interaction, in specific socio-cultural, socio-economic, socio-political and socio-historical contexts or ‘narrative environments’. This is an endeavour to recognise the argumentativeness, the persuasiveness, the agency or ‘actantiality’ (potential for action) and the performativity of designs and to acknowledge that how they are ‘interpreted’, what they ‘mean’ and how they are ‘valued’ are parts of what they ‘do’ in ‘commanding’, or indeed ‘commandeering’, the world.

Designs may be described, using terms derived from Husserl’s discussion of time consciousness, as ‘tertiary retentions’ (Stiegler, 2001) and ‘tertiary protentions’ (Hui, 2018). These are the remainders-reminders, the persistences and insistences, the ‘left-overs’ that provide the material ‘grounds’ or premises for thinking and acting, both as recalling and as projecting, as remembering and anticipating, and, by implication, situating. Use of these terms aims to highlight the contingent and conditional grounding of memory through attention and attentiveness, on the one hand, and the future orientation of action, its projective character, on the other hand. They may be conceived as interactive domains wherein imagination, intelligence and cognition emerge, themselves perceptible as materially interwoven bodily techniques, as discussed by Mauss (2006). In this sense of being retentions-protentions, designs have some similarities to Derridean, and perhaps Marxian, ‘spectrality’ and ‘hauntings’. ^[2]

It is the ‘there’, that which is passed on and that into which we are ‘thrown’, the given as inherited environment, designed in one sense yet undesigned in other senses, which is continually being re-worked, re-formed and re-shaped by design as professional practice, guided, in part, by the practices and conceptualisations of academic design education^[3]. Design, then, can be recognised as an academic discipline, in one context, and, in another context, as a public discipline, an element that grounds, sustains and regulates the norms of the public realm as interwoven public space, public order, public discourse and public opinion. Yet designs are not simply normative. They remain open to challenge, change and invention as the in-coming of the other. Nevertheless, design has become, in the words of Folkmann (2023: ix), “a noncircumventable condition for human lives”.

In the conception of philosophy of design in this incomplete and incompletable net-work, it is analogous to, but differs from, philosophy of art, philosophy of technology, philosophy of history, philosophy of science and philosophy of mathematics, while having something to learn from each of these domains.

The design philosophical perspective being developed here is guided by an aesthetic that admits the impermanence, imperfection and incompleteness of the world; or, in other words, it argues that it is not, and could not be, the purpose of design to ‘fix’ the world permanently, to make it perfect and to complete it: to ‘end’ the world; to ‘purify’ the world. Alternatively, or perhaps in addition, design, like philosophy itself, is impossible without a philosophy of the socio-historical (Castoriadis, 1989)

Perhaps another way of stating this politico-aesthetic perceptual practice is to say that it is guided by an aversion to the contemporary acceptance that, “More and more, more is more.” (Koolhaas, 2002: 176); or, to put it in Beckettian terms, “Less and less, less is less”. Designs, in this sense, are residual: what is left over; made of existing residues; fragmentary traces having only residual effects – more or less. One residual path disjoins design, taste and the marketplace in their figurative dis-figuration of the everyday. In other word, design as material public discourse belongs to and takes part in a trans-temporal, socio-historical public space (Castoriadis, 1989).

As material public discourse, sets of designs inter-relate to form design ecologies: cultural formations which are, in part, public pedagogy and, in part, modes of governance. In this, Incomplete … follows insights articulated by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who argues that culture,

“is best seen not as complexes of concrete behavior patterns – customs, usages, traditions, habit clusters – … but as a set of control mechanisms – plans, recipes, rules, instructions (what computer engineers call ‘programs’) – for the governing of behavior.”
(Geertz, 2017, c1973)

In this way, designs can be seen as providing plans, recipes, rules, instructions and programs for behaviour. Designs are not simply interpreted symbolically or aesthetically and used instrumentally. They also provide guidance for social action and interaction. They are, in that sense, ideological. Conversely, it is also possible to see explicit political-economic ideologies themselves as designs. As Teasley, Riello and Adamson (2011: 1) put it,

“Arguably, right-wing economic free market ideologies and left-wing arguments for market controls might be understood as forms of design in their own right.”

A similar orientation to language and culture to that of Geertz is articulated by Deleuze and Guattari (1983, 1987) for whom language forcefully asserts what is to be done rather than signifying something that must be believed. Statements, for Deleuze and Guattari, are what they call ‘order words’ which command. Language is as much vocative, addressing and invoking subjects, as it is a form of mediation, communication, information or signification. In short, language commands and configures, In this view, language is primarily meant for obedience and resistance. The statement, as performative, succeeds by means of force, as a provocation (Nealon, 2003).

This ‘control mechanism’ approach to culture assumes that human thought is both social and public. Its natural habitat is the house yard, the marketplace, the town square and so on. Thus, in this view, thinking consists not solely of cerebral cognition, although this is a necessary part, but of an ongoing flow of significant symbols. Such symbols are, in large part, words but also include gestures, drawings, musical sounds, mechanical devices or natural objects, in other words, anything that is disengaged from its mere actuality and can be used to impose meaning upon experience. As can be clearly seen, this includes designs of all levels of complexity, from artefact, through service to environment and system.

Geertz further argues that humans are,

“precisely the animal most desperately dependent upon such extragenetic, outside-the-skin control mechanisms, such cultural programs, for ordering [their, AP] behavior.”
(Geertz, 2017)

Thus, Geertz concludes,

“We are, in sum, incomplete or unfinished animals who complete or finish ourselves through culture – and not through culture in general but through highly particular forms of it: Dobuan and Javanese, Hopi and Italian, upper-class and lower-class, academic and commercial.”
(Geertz, 2017)

Nevertheless, such specific concrete cultures through which we strive to complete ourselves are themselves, it is argued here, unending, incomplete processes. Designs, as part of human exosomatisation-endosomatisation, are, of necessity, ‘incomplete’ rather than forming “a closed and completed system of truth,” in the words of William James in What psychical research has accomplished.

The approach taken to the ‘truth’ of design practice is therefore similar to Lacan’s topological positioning of truth in analytical practice, which must be dramatised as incompletion. As Marriott (2021: 169) explains, for Lacan it is not the desire for truth which is to be criticised but truth-in-itself and truth as an ideal.

Lacan (2013: 9) argues that it is defensible to say that truth has the structure of fiction, normally called ‘myth’. It is precisely for the reason that many truths have a mythical existence that truth cannot be exhausted and the whole truth cannot be said.

“truth can only be half said. One speaks the truth as best one can, that is, in part. It is just that in the way it presents itself, it presents itself as a whole. And that’s precisely where the difficulty lies — it’s that you have to make the one who is in analysis sense that this truth is not whole, that it’s not true for everyone, that it isn’t — this is an old idea — that it isn’t general, that it’s not valid for everyone.”.
(Lacan, 2013: 9)

Incomplete …, then, explores how design practices, in their mythical forms, may be able to address the social, cultural, political and environmental challenges, local challenges that are simultaneously global challenges, unlocatable challenges, arising as the 21st century unfolds.

That design practices will realise their potential, however, is far from certain …

Notes

[1] Derrida (1994: 221) frames the ‘there’ in the following terms: “If he loves justice at least, the “scholar” of the future, the “intellectual” of tomorrow should … learn to live by learning not how to make conversation with the ghost but how to talk with him, with her, how to let them speak or how to give them back speech, even if it is in oneself, in the other, in the other in oneself: they are always there, specters, even if they do not exist, even if they are no longer, even if they are not yet. They give us to rethink the “there” as soon as we open our mouths …”

For Heidegger, as explained by Keiling (2021: 733) “‘The there’ serves as an indication of the place in which a subject’s experience takes place and agents are confronted with normative demands. Discussions of the there attempt to address this situated and situational condition of the possibility for all meaningful experience.”

Despite variations in his usage, Keiling (2021: 734) thinks that Heidegger can lay claim to continuity in his thinking of the there. For example, “The there in Being and Time does not mean a statement of place but rather it should designate the openness where entities can be present for the human, and the human being also for himself” (Zoll 157/120). “As such indeterminate openness, “the there” conditions any possible correlation of the subjective and the objective, of Dasein and entities,” Keiling asserts.

[2] Postone (1998) writes that Derrida’s book, Specters of Marx, is organised around the central notion of spectrality, defined as that which is not identical with the present. This notion calls into question the givenness and necessity of the present order of things, the existing situation. It is, Postone explains, “at the heart of Derrida’s attempt to outline a critical theory of contemporary society that appropriates the emancipatory spirit of Marx’s approach while providing a fundamental critique of contemporary capitalist society as well as of traditional Marxist theory and practice.”

Derrida (1994: 98-99) himself writes, “Electoral representativity or parliamentary life is not only distorted, as was always the case, by a great number of socio-economic mechanisms, but it is exercised with more and more difficulty in a public space profoundly upset by techno-tele-media apparatuses and by new rhythms of information and communication, by the devices and the speed of forces represented by the latter, but also and consequently by the new modes of appropriation they put to work, by the new structure of the event and of its spectrality that they produce (both invent and bring up to date, inaugurate and reveal, cause to come about and bring up to light at the same time, there where they were already there without being there: it is the relation of the concept of production to the ghost that is in question here).” … “Let us recall the technical, scientific, and economic transformations that, in Europe, after the First World War, already upset the topological structure of the res publica, of public space, and of public opinion. They affected not only this topological structure, they also began to make problematic the very presumption of the topographical, the presumption that there was a place, and thus an identifiable and stabilizable body for public speech, the public thing, or the public cause …”

[3] This may be too Heideggerian an understanding of the ‘there’ and the ‘there is’, over-estimating the ‘generosity’ of of givenness. In this regard, Sean Hand (1989: 29) explains that, for Levinas, ‘there is’ is anonymous and impersonal being in general: “There is is an impersonal form, like in it rains, or it is warm.” (Levinas, 1989: 30)

‘There is’ exists prior to experiential nothingness, for example, in the noise within silence that one hears when putting a shell to one’s ear or as the horrifying silence confronting the vigilant insomniac who both is and is not an ‘I’. ‘There is’ marks the end of objectivising consciousness: it is not an object of perception or thought; and it cannot be grasped or intentionally constituted. One cannot avoid the experience of the ‘there is’ because one is steeped in it.

This impersonality runs contrary the generosity of the Heideggerian version of ‘there is’, the es gibt, derived from the verb geben, to give. For example, in Being and Time Heidegger asserts that the temporalising movement of our existence brings meaning and worth to the world as a kind of generous project, the donation of a gift. Thus, prior to the essence of Being which, in Heidegger, is to give and confer its truth, Levinas sees an eternal vigilance which characterises existence as bathed in infinity, thereby introducing the alterity and infinity that will structure his later ethics.

References

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Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1983) Anti-Oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987) A Thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Derrida, J. (1994) Specters of Marx: the state of the debt, the work of mourning and the New International. New York, NY: Routledge.

Folkmann, M. N. (2023) Design aesthetics: theoretical basics and studies in implication. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Geertz, C. (2017, c1973) The Impact of the concept of culture on the concept of man, in The Interpretation of cultures: selected essays. 3rd edn. New York, NY: Basic Books, pp. 44–64.

Golembiewski, J. A. (2016) The Designed environment and how it affects brain morphology and mental health, Health Environments Research and Design Journal, 9(2), pp. 161–171. doi: 10.1177/1937586715609562.

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Incomplete … is written and curated by Allan Parsons.