RELATED TERMS: Enlightenment; Posthumanism; Posthuman; Postanthropocentrism; Realism; Modernity

Michel Foucault argues that the term humanism should not be confused with that of Enlightenment. The importance of grasping the notions of humanism and Enlightenment for design practices is that it bears directly upon how the domain of humanity and the human is understood in the design process and in the designed artefacts, experiences and environments, i.e. how is human actantiality and potentiality understood in the ways the design continues to works (continues to design inn the world).

Foucault argues that the Enlightenment is a set of events and complex historical processes that is located at a certain point in the development of European societies which includes elements of social transformation, types of political institution, forms of knowledge, projects of rationalisation of knowledge and practices and technological mutations. All of this is very difficult to sum up in a word, even if many of these phenomena remain important today.

Rather than a set of events, Foucault (1984: 44) suggests that humanism is a set of themes that have reappeared on several occasions over time in European societies. These themes are always tied to value judgments and have varied greatly in their content as well as in the values they have preserved. Furthermore, they have served as a critical principle of differentiation. For example, in the seventeenth century, there was a humanism that presented itself as a critique of Christianity or of religion in general; and there was a Christian humanism opposed to an ascetic and much more theocentric humanism.

In the nineteenth century, there was a suspicious humanism hostile and critical toward science and another that, to the contrary, placed its hope in that same science. Marxism has been, for some, a humanism; as have existentialism and personalism.

In the twentieth century, there was a time when people supported the humanistic values represented by National Socialism and when the Stalinists themselves said they were humanists.

References

Foucault, M. (1984). What is Enlightenment? In: The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow. New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 32–50.

RELATED TERMS: Historicism; Historical materialism – Marxism;

For Georg Lukacs (c.1971, 1923), in History and Class Consciousness, often said to be the inaugural text of Western Marxism, “history lies precisely in the changes undergone by those structural forms which are the focal points of man’s [sic] interaction with environment at any given moment and which determine the objective nature of both his [sic] inner and his outer life.” ‘Inner and outer life’ may be conceived in design practices as public imagination, while the imagination defined as both private (the Imaginary) and communal (the designed, material world and the Symbolic or public order it actively – i.e. actantially – maintains). The conjunction of the inner and the outer, or rather the interpenetration of the one and the other, constitutes a world and a storyworld as transmedia, environmental phenomenon.

Designs, in this context, are focalisers of historicity and ‘passing’. They are, thus, potential vehicles for re-articulating the public imagination through re-designing the public regime defined by ‘the order of things’. The Lukascian-Marxian approach is one way of translating the ‘thing-ness’ of designs into an understanding of the kind of interventions they make into socio-economic, socio-cultural, socio-political and socio-ecological practices and realities. For the Lukascian-Marxian approach, ‘things’ mask not just the transitoriness of all entities but also, more importantly, in their commodity form as fetish, the political economy, or the praxis, through which they were produced.

It is a question of how one understands the insight that the object or the objectification is, “not a thing but a social relation between persons mediated through things”. A double-edged sword, this may, on the one hand, be an anthropological recognition of our necessary dependence upon or entanglement with ‘things’, but, on the other hand, it may also be a political recognition of our vulnerability to being manipulated through specific articulations of ‘things’. This is a particularly knotted question for social semiotics.

References

Dilnot, C. (1984) ‘The State of design history, part II: problems and possibilities’, Design Issues, 1(2), pp. 3–30. doi: 10.2307/1511495.

Lukacs, G. (c.1971, 1923) History and class consciousness: studies in Marxist dialectics. Translated by R. Livingstone. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

RELATED TERMS: History; Design of Narrative Environments; Metalepsis; Genealogy – Nietzsche; Aleatory

Historicism, Hal Foster (1996: 10) notes, can be negatively defined in the most simple terms as the conflation of before and after with cause and effect, by making the presumption that the prior event produces the later one.

Foster also notes that historicism in this sense pervades art history and modernist studies.

The question of how causality, temporality, narrativity and their inter-relationships are conceptualised and thought through is a crucial one for design practices. Particular care should be taken to consider whether, in your design, you are encouraging an historicist reading or reception of it, and whether this is what you intend. The issue might be expressed as follows: how can complex causality be articulated through the temporalities brought into play by the plotting of narrativity?

The issue of causality, in relation to temporality and narrativity, brings into play the notions of complexity, chaos, chance, fate and accident or, in another vocabulary, questions of determinism, over-determination and under-determination. Issues related to determination are raised in the understanding of metalepsis within the context of design practices.

Reference

Foster, H. (1996). Who’s afraid of the neo-avant-garde? In: The Return of the real: the avant-garde at the end of the century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1–33.

RELATED TERMS: History; Critical Thinking; Cultural Studies; Design of Narrative Environments; Epic theatre – Brecht; Feminism and Materialism; Lefebvre; Methodology and Method;

Even though the crude teleological determinism, historicism and reductive economism of official communist ideology, or orthodox Marxism-Leninism, came to occupy the space of Marxist thinking, design practices may yet still benefit from considering a particular understanding of historical materialism, as inflected by the ‘western’ Marxist tradition (Merleau-Ponty, 1973), with its recovery of subjectivity, agency and culture. How might this be possible?

Jason Edwards (2010: 282-284) proposes that there are two ways of approaching an understanding of historical materialism.

The first is as a positivist science based on a humanist philosophical anthropology, human nature as the subject of history, and a teleological conception of history embodying a form of economic or technological determinism, as the successive development of modes of production.

The second is as the complex totality (as assemblage, a non-totalising totality?) of the material practices that are required to reproduce the relations of production over time. Thus, Edwards (2000: 284) contends, historical materialism, as a broad analysis of diverse social formations, recognises the diversity of the forms of practice that are necessary for sustaining the relations of production in very different kinds of societies.

Material practices, in this context, are taken to be regular forms of behaviour that are norm-governed and which involve a person’s relation to their body and to other bodies, as well as to experiential phenomena.

This complex whole (non-totalitarian totality) is instantiated in the everyday lives of people and, in turn, the material practices of everyday life are implicated in the political and economic power of the state and the international political economic system.

Edwards suggests that historical materialism, as conceived by Marx and Engels, needs to shed its humanism, historicism, economism and teleological determinism. This means that a more de-centred and relational conception of the subject is required, perhaps through such notions as the intercorporeal and the intersubjective conceived in materialist terms. So also is a less teleological and deterministic conception of historical change and societal organisation required, as is available, for example, through notions articulated by complexity theory.

Historical materialism, in this case, would focus on the character of everyday life and lived space, as discussed by Henri Lefebvre, for example. This examination would include the penetration of everyday life by various media and technologies of communication, as discussed by Benjamin, Adorno and Horkheimer. Furthermore, this discussion would now be extended to include internet-based, potentially participative, multimedia technologies. The relationships by means of which such ‘mass’ media and digital technologies are woven into the everyday, and the everyday is incorporated into the ordering of cities, regions, states and the international political economy, breaching the boundaries of the conception of place, can thus be seen to be multi-layered, involving both social, material and media modes of existence.

In this context, as has been noted and as Edwards (2000: 290) insists, the work of Lefebvre is of particular importance. His analyses of the experience of everyday life and the production of space through the interconnecting manifold of material and representational practices are vital for developing a meaningful historical materialism which may prove useful for the design of narrative environments.

Historical materialism, then, as one way of understanding antagonistic struggles or dramatic conflicts, may be of value in thinking about the design of narrative environments, particularly how their material aspects might be said to act within the horizon of a complex, contingent, contextual arrangement (dispositif, apparatus, assemblage, rhizome).

References

Edwards, J. (2010). The materialism of historical materialism. In D. Coole and S. Frost, eds., New materialisms: ontology, agency, and politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 281–297.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1973) ‘“Western” Marxism’, in Bien, J. (tran.) Adventures in the dialectic. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, pp. 30–58.

RELATED TERMS: Narratology; Protagonist; Human Actantiality

In The Hero with a thousand faces, Joseph Campbell examines many of the world’s heroic myths and stories. He ties the processes of transformation in those stories of the heroic journey to the quest to know the truest self, a task which, he avers, takes much time.

Campbell shows how,

“the heroic self seeks … a higher way of holding and conducting oneself. This heroic way offers depth of insight and meaning. It is attentive to guides along the way, and invigorates creative life. We see that the journey of the hero and heroine are most often deepened via ongoing perils. These include losing one’s way innumerable times, refusing the first call, thinking it is only one thing when it really is, in fact, quite another — as well as entanglements and confrontations with something of great and often frightening magnitude. Campbell points out that coming through such struggles causes the person to be infused with more vision, and to be strengthened by the spiritual life principle — which, more than anything else, encourages one to take courage to live with effrontery and mettle.”

(Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Introduction to the 2004 Commemorative Edition of The Hero with a thousand faces, p.xxiv)

Typically, in narratology, the hero is the protagonist of a story, the good guy or good girl with whom the audience might identify, empathise and sympathise. The notion of hero has the connotation of being ‘good’, which the notion of protagonist does not carry.

References

Campbell, J. (2004, 1949) The Hero with a thousand faces. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

RELATED TERMS: Avant-garde movements; Environments – Art; Installation Art; Performance and Performativity

Happenings, the forerunners of performance art, emerged from the theatrical elements of dada and surrealism. American artist Allan Kaprow first used the term in his 1959 work ‘18 Happenings in 6 Parts’ which took place over six days from 4–10 October 1959 at the Reuben Gallery, New York.

Happenings generally took place in an environment or installation created within a gallery, using light, sound, slide projections and an element of spectator participation. They proliferated through the 1960s but gave way to performance art in which the focus was increasingly on the actions of the artist.

Apart from Kaprow, notable exponents of happenings include Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, Red Grooms and Robert Whitman. Lawrence Rinder (2020) mentions in passing that John Cage’s Theater Piece Number 1, which took place in the summer of 1952 and is one of the seminal artistic achievements of Black Mountain College, is considered by some to be the first Happening.

References

Kaprow, A. (2014) ‘Assemblages, environments and happenings’, in Brayshaw, T. and Witts, N. (eds) The Twentieth-Century Performance Reader, 3rd edn. London, UK: Routledge, pp. 277–287.

Kirby, Michael, ed, (1965) Happenings. New York: Dutton.

Rinder, L. (2020) Hippie modernism, in Complementary modernisms in China and the USA: Art as life/Art as idea. Santa Barbara, CA: Punctum Books, pp. 511–519.

Tate, Arts Terms, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/h/happening

RELATED TERMS: Architecture; Ecology; Habitus; Niche; Environment

According to Prabakaran Mahdu (2013),

“Habitat is not plain place of habitation. It is a field of negotiations. Habitats transform. The network of relationships, changes in membership patterns, transitions in the power and influence of constituents and the micro- politics of negotiations transform habitats. Transformed habitats gravitate the internal sinews and thereby transform the praxis pulsations, persons. The trilogy of habitus, habitat and praxis are indistinguishably related in making each other. A person is the indistinguishable trilogy represented by a name or identity.”

References

Prabakaran, Madhu (2013) Praxis, Habitus, Habitat and Persons. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2279402 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2279402