RELATED TERMS: Story (fabula) and Plot (sjuzet or sjuzhet); Defamiliarisation, Ostranenie or making strange Russian formalism distinguishes three aspects of story, i.e. fabula, sjuzet, and forma, which can roughly be translated as theme, discourse and genre. The first two terms, fabula and sjuzet, have been described by modern literary theorists as, respectively, the timeless orContinue reading “Genre”
Author Archives: aparsons474
Genealogy – Nietzsche
RELATED TERMS: Agonism and avant-gardism; Apparatus – Dispositif; Critical thinking; Historicism; Nihilism; Ontological designing; Philosophy Genealogy, as defined by Nietzsche, in as far as it is an approach to historicity, meaning-production and values, has great relevance for design practices, as it permits a particular kind of understanding of the limitations of historicism in understanding historicalContinue reading “Genealogy – Nietzsche”
Framing Narrative
RELATED TERMS: Use for: Frame narrative A framing narrative contains a second, or further, embedded narrative, or narratives, for which it provides a context or setting. Sometimes the framing narrative begins and ends the narrative as a whole, providing book ends. At other times, it is simply present at the beginning of the narrative, actingContinue reading “Framing Narrative”
Hochschule für Gestaltung
RELATED TERMS: Bauhaus; Black Mountain College; Deutscher Werkbund The Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm (Ulm Institute of Design) was founded in 1953. It closed in 1968 amid the cultural and political upheaval of the period. What made Ulm special was the idea that design should be understood and practiced as a socially relevant and ultimatelyContinue reading “Hochschule für Gestaltung”
Focalisation
RELATED TERMS: Agon; Agonistic politics – Mouffe; Dramatic conflict Use for: Focalization “Are you genuine? or just a play-actor? A representative? or the actual thing represented? — Ultimately you are even just an imitation play-actor … Second question for the conscience.” (Nietzsche, 1998: 9) Focalisation is a valuable concept for design practices because it facilitatesContinue reading “Focalisation”
The Commodity
RELATED TERMS: Alienation; Reification; Historical materialism – Marxism “A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.” Marx (1976: 163) “The belief systems of consumption and commodity have been exposed as empty.” (Brody, 2010)Continue reading “The Commodity”
Rhizome
RELATED TERMS: The term rhizome, ‘a tangle of roots’, is a metaphor for an assemblage, a multiplicity, a network, a complex adaptive system (CAS), an open system or a living ecology. In the majority of its contemporary usages, as a critique of rootedness and fundamentalism, it derives from Deleuze and Guattari (1987) who enumerate certainContinue reading “Rhizome”
Heidegger
RELATED TERMS: Arendt; The Everyday and Design; Lefebvre; Philosophy; Present-at-hand (Vorhanden) and Ready-to-hand (Zuhanden); Sloterdijk The work of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) is of great relevance to design practices and to the analysis of designs as elements of material culture because it deals with spatio-temporal ways of being in the world and contains concepts such asContinue reading “Heidegger”
Design and General Economic Anti-Epistemology
RELATED TERMS: Complementarity General and restricted economies Plotnitsky (1994: 2): “General economy denotes a mode of theory that relates the configurations it considers to the loss of meaning – a loss it regards as ineluctable within any given system. The concept of general economy was introduced by Bataille and deployed by Derrida, although Nietzsche mayContinue reading “Design and General Economic Anti-Epistemology”
Plato, Platonism and Neoplatonism
RELATED TERMS: Myth and philosophy can be seen as two forms of narrative, Keum (2021) suggests. Keum (2021) argues that during the 18th century, Plato was adopted as the original champion of philosophy’s long and continuing battle against myth. Prior to that, Europeans would have been more familiar with a different portrait of Plato’s thought:Continue reading “Plato, Platonism and Neoplatonism”
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