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Theory [Snippets 11]

RELATED TERMS: Posthuman; Postmodernism; Poststructuralism; Structuralism; Theoretical Practice

What is the state and status of theory in the 2020s? For example, could it be argued that one can speak of a cycle, a story cycle, a twisted tale from which there is no escape, one that traces the turns and returns within an intergenerational inheritance that cannot be declined, the gift given to us, that speaks of, “untimely specters that one must not chase away but sort out, critique, keep close by, and allow to come back” (Derrida, 1994: 87).

Thus, do we inherit (American) cybernetics (of the 1940s-1960s) through (French) structuralism (of the 1950s-1960s), itself becoming (French) post-structuralism (of the 1960s-1970s) that returns as (American) postmodernism (of the 1980s-1990s), that proliferates into … ‘globalised-localised’, ‘internationalised’, ‘deterritorialised’ theory[-activism] or activism[-theory], in an ontological, practice but not pragmatic turn. Theoretical moments become social movements, theoretical-activist-movements that articulate distinctive axio-epistemo-ontologies – modes of existence in which ‘we’ are constituted and partake, but not necessarily together or in a spirit of togetherness. To paraphrase Hayles (1999), while some of us became posthuman, others became nonhuman.

Worldlessness #2: Worldlessness and Design

RELATED TERMS: World; World-as-Milieu; World-Building; Worldlessness #1

How are we to understand whether contemporary and past design practices are vitally important or utterly trivial, or a mixture of both. In other words, do they matter and, if so, how do they matter?

From this perspective, it is notable that contemporary design practices are often described as world-building or world-making, even in their more critical or speculative forms, such as that of Tony Dunne and Fiona Raby. For example, in Speculative Everything, they argues that,

“Although design usually references sculpture and painting for material, formal and graphic inspiration, and more recently the social sciences for protocols on working with and studying people — if we are interested in shifting design’s focus from designing for how the world is now to designing for how things could be — we will need to turn to speculative culture and what Lubomír Doležel has called an ‘experimental laboratory of the world-constructing enterprise’.” (Dunne and Raby, 2013: 69)

Dunne and Raby describe a design experiment in which they began with new ways of organising everyday life through alternative beliefs, values, priorities and ideologies, proceeding thereafter to develop scenarios and personas to bring it to life. In doing so, they sought to “tell worlds rather than stories”, as they put it, citing Bruce Sterling (Sterling and Bosch, 2012)^[1]. The question they pose for this approach is whether the viewer, when presented with design proposals for objects, would imagine the world to which the designs belong, thereby moving from the specific to the general. They contend that,

“This is very different from other world-making activities such as cinema and game design in which the world itself is shown, and even architecture, which usually presents an overview from which the viewer has to imagine the specific.” (Dunne and Raby, 2013: 173)

Worldlessness #1

“Ridiculous sums of money are spent producing bronze sculptures. Honoring heroes and artists on Stockholm’s street corners. Akay’s concrete sculptures give tribute to **the [anonymous, AP] invisible** citizens, they offer a reminder of more affordable solutions to a problem. People approach the sculptures with caution, so life like. Is it real? It’s not real. Some gather around to kick a man when he’s down. This is real.– Kid Pele. January, 2006″ cited in the book, *The Art of Rebellion 2* by C100

A Possible Phenomenology of the Anonymous, the Invisible, the Im-material and the Im-mediate

It was noted in The Paradox of the Anonymous that Dan Hancox (2025) projectively and retrojectively ascribes to Walter Benjamin a wish or a command for us, “to sift through the rubble, bring up the dead, to reassemble history from below.”

The question that this potential (re-)writing of history from below raises is that of methodology: what are the methods of remembering, recovering or, indeed, ‘creating’ the evidence from which such a history can be assembled or re-assembled? It is a question of figuring, configuring and re-configuring. What the notions of the anonymous, those without name, and the invisible, those without image or (phenomenal) appearance, brings to attention, it might be argued, is the (nominalist) logocentrism and the (anthropic) ocularcentrism of world-making and therefore of world-history making. World history consists of (named, located, traceable) events in which the actions of named (individuals and peoples) become visible phenomena (appearances) and the consequences of those actions tracked temporally through a narrative of these worldly events.

Econarratology

RELATED TERMS: Narratology

What does this image ‘say’?; and how does it ‘say’ it: What does this image ‘show’?

The question underlying this post is the issue of what an adequate narratology would be for the practice of the design of narrative environments, an approach to designing that emphasises the (necessary) inter-relationships among people, narratives and environments.

In this context, the potential value of econarratology can be seen in three respects.

Firstly, it is an example of postclassical, contextualist narratology, which relates the formal, material and media elements of a narrative discourse to environmental, cultural and social systems to generate situated, meaning-creating interactions and interpretations; in short, people, narrative and environment are all brought into play in econarratology.

Secondly, it takes account of the cognitive dimensions of the narrative-environment interaction. This allows for the possibility of bringing into play the 4E cognition paradigm that the design of narrative environments acknowledges, in which cognition, learning, intelligence and interaction are seen to be embodied, extended, embedded and enactive.

Burnout Society

RELATED TERMS: Disciplinary Societies and Societies of Control

The question underlying this post is whether design practices are carried along by the shift proposed by Byung-Chul Han (2015), the impetus coming from elsewhere, or are they highly active proponents and drivers of the change, providing the materials for depressive evaluations of oneself, compulsive inattentiveness or hyper-attention as a scattered mode of awareness, and creative and productive burnout. Aside from this, there remains the question of how well this depicts societal processes in the period since the 1990s and whether the occurrence of Covid 19 might alter the characterisation of societal organisation so that it accommodates, perhaps in contradictory ways, the articulation of immunological and hyperpositive responses to disease and unease, a movement reinforced by the confused interaction of globalisation (hybridisation) and nationalist protectionism (immunological defence) evident in the mid-2020s.

From Immunological Organisation and Defence to the Violence of Positive Sameness

Byung-Chul Han (2015), the Korean-German philosopher, argues that the 20th century was an immunological age, an epoch in which distinctions between inside and outside, friend and foe and self and other were of paramount importance. However, in his view, a little-acknowledged paradigm shift has been underway for some time, beginning around the time of the ending of the Cold War in 1989-1991. In this emerging paradigm, contemporary society increasingly escapes the immunological scheme of organisation and defence and instead is marked by the lessening in importance of the categories of otherness and foreignness.

Technology, Process Knowledge, Temporality and Design

RELATED TERMS: Hypomnesis, Hypermnesis and Anamnesis; Methodology and Method; Practice

The process of piling, in expectation of … re-using? … discarding? … re-processing? …

Dan Wang (2025: 71) distinguishes among three meanings of technology. The first is technologies as tools, for example, the pots, pans, knives, ovens and so on required to prepare a meal. Second, technologies can operate as explicit means of instruction, for example, the recipes, blueprints or patents that can be written down, followed and passed on. Third, and for Wang the most important, is technologies as process knowledge, that is, the proficiency gained from practical experience. This last is often discussed in terms of know-how, institutional memory and tacit knowledge, as Wang (2025: 74) notes.

To explore the value of his position, Wang brings to attention the specificity of Chinese process knowledges in the context of the history of architecture. He notes that builders across the world, from the Ancient Egyptians to medieval Europeans and more recently, have sought to arrest the erosion that affects buildings through time by using durable materials, such as stone, which endow the building with a degree of longevity and endurance, if not permanence. However, as discussed by Simon Leys in his 2009 book The Hall of Uselessness, In China builders have embraced the passage of time by using exceedingly perishable, often fragile, materials. By building temples out of wood, with panelling sometimes made of paper, Chinese architecture had a built-in obsolescence. This means that the buildings, if they are to be preserved, demand frequent renewal. Rather than employing the strongest, most durable materials, making the building last, Chinese builders instead embraced transient materials as a means towards the prolongation of designs whose goals are spiritual, by making the process of (re-)building the persistent element.

Governance, Politics and Design

RELATED TERMS: Politics and the Political

That forms of governance are ‘designed’ is often acknowledged only in passing. For example, the trend towards authoritarianism in the politics of the USA is recognised by some to have accelerated under Trump rather than to have begun with him. To argue that US authoritarianism began with Trump, Abdelrahman ElGendy (cited in Roth, 2025) comments, is to assume that the USA was a healthy, functioning democracy that faltered, which ElGendy thinks is not the case. He continues,

“When a democracy is designed with this capacity for authoritarianism you’re never more than one election away from its reappearance. That’s not an accident, that’s a design flaw.” (ElGendy, cited in Roth, 2025)

World as Geoeconomics and Geopolitics [Snippets 10]

RELATED TERMS: World; World-Building; Design, the Buddhisms, Geo-Politics and Geo-Economics

The context for design practices in the 2020s, the macro framing ‘world’ or the macro framing narrative environment in which they operate, might be described as a period in which the existing world order is in transition. Many of the practices and verities of neoliberal globalisation are being rejected or are falling apart. As a Guardian (2025) editorial puts it, “The postwar order stood on three pillars: US dominance, hydrocarbons and open trade. Today, all three are cracking…”

This current situation can be seen in the light of an economic-financial history of the 20th century, such as the one outlined by Gillian Tett (2025). The narrative path begins in the late 19th century with imperialist globalisation; it passes through the protectionist, nationalist populism of the 1918-1939 period; on to the welfarism and international co-operation of the post-1945 period; and through to the neoliberal globalisation of the 1980s to 2008. The narrative then moves back towards protectionist, state-interventionist, nationalist populism, beginning in the post-2008 financial crisis and intensifying in the Covid-19 period and its aftermath.

Where do design objects, services and strategies, as, in effect, our media-material perceptual ecosystem that enables us to ‘see’ and to ‘feel’ this enframing world, stand in this shifting terrain, a question that cleaves most closely to that of what are their (assumed) political-ideological stances in relation to their (actual) performativities or actantialities: what designs do, how they do what they are doing and whether they are capable of acting otherwise? Taking note of the discussion in Design, the Buddhisms, Geo-Politics and Geo-Economics do design practices find themselves in the 2020s in an analogous position to the liberal activists in the USA in the 1980s in that they are playing a role in a morality play designed to help solidify the USA’s global political and economic domination, even while they may be critical of that aspiration. A major difference, however, is that the drama has in the meantime dropped any illusion of there being the possibility of occupying a moral high ground, opting instead for a narrower geo-psycho-drama in which domination is assured solely through force.

(The) Common (World)

RELATED TERMS: (The) Everyday and Design; World; Worldlessness

USE FOR: Shared World; World in Common

The Common: A domestic interior, once private, becomes the setting for an art gallery exhibition, now common

You-I interconnectedness and Being-with

The initial discursive sources for the recognition of the common, as the shared world, the only world that there is, are firstly Beata Stawarska’s dialogical phenomenology, which establishes the ontological primacy of the the You-I relation over the linguistic and the agential-performative ‘I’ as well as the individuated, actantial embodied ‘me’; and secondly Jean-Luc Nancy’s assertion of the ontological primacy of the relational being-with in the unfolding of being-in-the world.

Thus, for example, in Nancy’s account, singular beings cannot be abstracted from their spatiality or spaciousness: the space they inhabit through movement; the space they take up as ‘substantial’ entities; and the space opened by this operating and structuring. Being in the world assumes appearance and disclosure in and of spatial forms, incorporating movement. Singular beings are intimately bound up with the spatial and temporal unfolding of the world. Thus, being, space and world are inter-dependent (Dikec, 1997: 66).

Design, the Buddhisms, Geo-Politics and Geo-Economics

Preamble

In a post on David Lynch’s film set design in relation to the design of narrative environments (Narrative Environments – Lynchian Set Design), the significance of Tibet, meditation and yoga in Twin Peaks was seen to exhibit signs of intertextuality with late Victorian European and American encounters with Asian religions (Krug, 2017). A genealogy of the construction of the ‘supernatural’ in Twin Peaks can therefore be traced to this particular period in the Western encounter with Buddhist traditions.

Such an intertextual semiotics is valuable. It shows the links between literary data from South Asian literature dating from as early as the first millennium and a pop-cultural television phenomena addressed to an early 1990s television audience. If one relies upon this means alone, however, to explain the appearance and significance of the themes of Tibet, meditation and yoga in Twin Peaks, there is a risk that it becomes formal and ahistorical. In discussing what these signifiers mean, the issue is not simply where such tropes have come from, their borrowed meanings, but also why they are (re-)appearing at this particular historical moment, their contemporary significance.