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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.

Narrative Environments – Lynchian Set Design

RELATED TERMS: Actant; Defamiliarisation; Liminality; Design, the Buddhisms, Geo-Politics and Geo-Economics

Greer Lankton, It’s all about ME, not you, 1996/2009

According to Edwin Heathcote (2025), the interiors in David Lynch’s films suggest that, “our environment is somehow theatrical, temporary, a dream – an expression of the subconscious.” Lynch, while working with production designers, “conceived of these rooms as spaces with every bit as much character as the actors.”

In other words, in the language of Greimasian narrative semiotics and Actor-network theory, the room, as environment, is an actant. The room ‘acts’. It has ‘agency’ or rather actantiality, potential to act in an ensemble or network situation. In Lynch’s case, the designed rooms act to ‘disorient’ the audience-spectator, by imbalancing the degree of ‘agency’ distributed among the actors and the environment as ‘set’ or ‘set-up’. In turn, this alters the amount of attention that needs to be paid to the ‘set-up’ as much as to what the actors ‘do’ and ‘say’. Lynch’s interior sets perform an act of defamiliarisation and ‘making strange’. An awareness emerges that ‘this is a set-up’. ‘We’ have been ‘set up’. We have, like the actors in the drama, been ‘framed’.

Black Studies

Theaster Gates – Collage presented in exhibition *1965: Malcolm in Winter: A Translation Exercise*, White Cube, 2025

Writing in 2020, Dhanveer Singh Brar and Ashwani Sharma contend that,

“In a manner similar to ‘French’ post-structuralism in the 1970s and 1980s, U.S. Black Critical Thought offers an urgently needed – if not always satisfactory – grammar to address the racial faultlines of UK knowledge formation.”

In discussing how this more recent intellectual importation came about, Brar and Sharma trace the prior influence of black British cultural studies, developed by the likes of Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy from the 1970s to the 1990s, on what they are calling US black critical thought, practised by the likes of Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, Sylvia Wynter, Fred Moten, Stefano Harney, Frank Wilderson, Jared Sexton, Nahum Dimitri Chandler, David Marriott and Denise Ferreira da Silva (Baker, Diawara and Lindeborg, 1996; Brar and Sharma, 2020).

It is this cycle of influence that makes US black critical thought so recognisable in the UK.

Black Studies in the USA

Marable (2008: 2) points out that, since the founding of Black Studies in academic institutions in the USA in the 1960s, there has been an ideological debate about what the appropriate geopolitical and cultural boundaries for the study of blackness should be. Marable outlines three main approaches:

The Afrocentric approach argues that the black experience in the USA is but a subsidiary of a much larger African civilisational story. Therefore, Black Studies should trace its intellectual lineage back to classical Egyptian civilisation.
The African Diasporic approach, taking note of the destructive effects of the transatlantic slave trade, focuses on the cultural and political resistance of African Diasporic populations scattered across North America, South America, the Caribbean, Europe and Asia as a decisive element in the making of the modern world.
The African American-centric approach, developed by scholars educated in the USA, emphasise the struggles waged by African Americans to achieve political rights and equality against the American nation-state.

Hallucination and Confabulation

One way of conceiving the co-dependence or collaboration between human agency and artificial intelligence (AI) agency is to consider it through the lens of the metaphors used to understand the processes of Large Language Models (LLMs). Smith, Greaves and Panch (2023), for example, argue that using a precise and accurate metaphorical language to convey the complex functions and malfunctions of LLMs can lead to a better understanding of these powerful digital technologies. Through a meticulous choice of metaphors, taken from the language used to describe human neuro-cognitive processes for example, a better shared understanding of the complex concepts in the field of AI and LLMs may be achieved.

Thus, Smith, Greaves and Panch (2023) argue that employing the term ‘hallucination’ to characterise the inaccurate and non-factual outputs generated by LLMs implies that LLMs are engaged in perceiving, in other words, becoming consciously aware of a sensory input. However, since LLMs do not have sensory experiences, they cannot mistakenly perceive them as real. Therefore, the term ‘hallucination’ misrepresents the kind of process occurring within LLMs that it aims to characterise. The LLM is not ‘seeing’ something that is not there. Rather, the LLM is making things up.

The Paradox of the Anonymous: When We Wake [Snippets 9]

RELATED TERMS: History; Large Language Models; Hallucination and Confabulation

“The Arcades Project, Benjamin’s great study of 19th-century Paris, is in Jameson’s phrase an unfinished ‘collection of clippings’.”

“Benjamin thought of writing a book consisting entirely of quotations; Wittgenstein contemplated writing one consisting entirely of jokes.”

(Terry Eagleton, 2021)

Walter Benjamin and Brian Eno, in different decades, in different contexts and in different ways, are both ‘against’ the ‘great man theory of history’. However, this insight, gleaned from journalistic discourse, takes place in the context of a profile of Benjamin (Hancox, 2025) and an interview with Eno (Shariatmadari, 2025), who are both treated implicitly and explicitly as ‘great men’ who have, in some way, ‘made history’.

This type of paradox, or is it simple inconsistency, might suit Benjamin well, if Hancox (2025) is to be believed, since Benjamin, “rarely set foot in a synagogue but was greatly influenced by Jewish mysticism; he never joined the Communist party but was one of the century’s most important Marxist intellectuals;” while, as a (Jewish, Marxisant, philosophical) intellectual, Benjamin nevertheless, “saw the value of taking popular culture, mass media and the business of living seriously”.^[1]

Snippet Methodology [Snippets 8]

Roger Berkowitz (2024) sets out a warning of the limitations of snippets if taken as a sole, self-contained method without a framing methodology. He says in an interview,

“if I wanna cite a quote about freedom I can just say “Google, find me a quote about freedom from Plato.” And it works. And I can also ask Chat GPT. And there’s an enormous power to that. The negative is I don’t have to read Plato to cite Plato. And that’s dangerous because people are then citing Plato without having tried to grapple with Plato and the fullness of his thought. And so you take snippets out, fit them into your argument, and you don’t actually understand Plato’s argument or Kant’s argument or Ralph Ellison’s argument, Du Bois’ argument… and I find that to be really problematic – I shouldn’t say problematic. I think it’s inhuman. And it’s unintellectual, anti-intellectual in the sense that we don’t encounter full arguments because we can find the snippets we need. Chat GPT is just the next level of that.” (Berkowitz, 2024)

Design, Axiology and Value – Part 1

RELATED TERMS: The Commodity; Design History; Libidinal Economy – Part 1

Ruben Ulises Rodriguez Montoya, Skinchangers

“Valuing is a form of ranking”
(Kelleher, 2015)

Preamble

The question for design practices running through the following text is whether they partake in keeping us focused on, in the words of Issberner and Lena (2023), “a naive faith in progress, consumerist ideology and powerful economic lobbies”.

Design is inextricably connected to value, for example, to use value, to economic value, to cultural value and to personal values. Andrew Liu (2020) discusses ‘value’ in terms that may prove a useful beginning for understanding the specific socio-cultural and socio-historical relationships between design and value and the potential of design as an ecological, social and cultural force.

Liu’s focus of concern is to understand how capitalism developed in rural India and China. He argues that, in seeking to grasp how the passage to capitalism took place under different conditions, it is necessary to break away from the emphasis on the experience of North America and Europe, such as, for example, the experience in England which took a path from dispossession to proletarianisation to mechanisation.

The Twentieth Century, America, Americanisation [Snippets 7]

RELATED TERMS:

*Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Adios Map, 2021,*

In 1932, Gertrude Stein wrote that America is,

“the oldest country in the world because by the methods of the civil war and the commercial conceptions that followed it America created the twentieth century, and since all the other countries are now either living or commencing to be living a twentieth century life, America having begun the creation of the twentieth century in the sixties of the nineteenth century is now the oldest country in the world.” (quoted by Frank, 2024)

Edwin Frank (2024) comments: “In this nicely gnomic pronouncement there’s the wit of Oscar Wilde as well as — looking at the Civil War as method — an almost Leninist realism and sangfroid …”

Large Language Models

RELATED TERMS: Promptography; Hallucination and Confabulation; World; World-Building

In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, have become synonymous with the idea of artificial intelligence (AI). In order to train these chatbots, as Jack Apollo George (2024) notes, technology companies are employing human annotators or ‘data quality specialists’. The companies and the LLMs need examples of the kind of writing that the model will then emulate.

George points to two levels of irony in the situation as it currently stands. At the more immediate socio-economic level the irony is that the LLMs were developed in order to automate the task of writing. The better such models become at writing, the more rapidly the careers of human writers will decline and perish. Working as a digital annotator to improve the capacities of LLMs may be viewed as an exercise in self-destruction.

Arendt, Phenomenology and the Design of Narrative Environments [Essays]

1 Arendt’s phenomenological ~~method~~

Hannah Arendt seldom referred to herself as a phenomenologist and she is not usually included in textbook treatments of the subject (Moran, 2000: 287). She had no particular interest in the phenomenological method and did not explicitly contribute to the theory of phenomenology, being suspicious of all methods and systems. Nevertheless, her work exhibits a certain practice of phenomenological seeing, in the form of a careful attention to phenomena and avoidance of conventional characteristics. Her work, therefore, can be treated as a kind of phenomenology, one whose topic is ‘publicness’ in all of its guises, for example, public space, the public realm, res publica. Her conception of the public, as political and as a ‘space of appearance’, is in most respects phenomenological: everything that is manifest to humans belongs to the space of appearance, to phenomenality (Moran, 2000: 287-288).