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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]

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*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

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).

Sloterdijk and the Design of Narrative Environments [Essays]

1. Envelopes

Bruno Latour points out that when it is said that ‘Dasein is thrown into the world’ [1], as does Heidegger, the significance of the preposition ‘into’ is often overlooked. Peter Sloterdijk, however, Latour notes, does not overlook it and indeed dwells on it, asking such questions as: ‘into what is Dasein thrown?’, ‘where is Dasein thrown?’ and, perhaps more mischievously, what is the temperature there, the colour of the walls, the materials chosen, the technology for disposing of refuse, the cost of the air conditioning, and so on. Have you, as an exemplum of Dasein, Sloterdijk asks by way of clarification, been ‘thrown’ or cast into a room or into an air-conditioned amphitheatre? Alternatively, are you ‘outside’?

Iconic Designs, Critical Designs

RELATED TERMS: Iconic Designs and Iconic Designers; Imaginary

The Iconic

As acknowledged in Iconic Designs and Iconic Designers, the iconic approach to design is not wholly without merit. For example, it recognises that designs have cultural meanings and other-than-utilitarian uses, such as in the construction, maintenance and performance of self-hood and social standing. In other words, the notion of iconicity draws attention to designs as important socio-cultural phenomena or actants in everyday social practices and material public discourses.

The reservation expressed about the iconic approach to design was that, in as far as it seems to depend on a prior approach to art which emphasises titled ‘works’ and named ‘artists’, it might place design practice in a secondary or derivative position to art practice. ‘Iconic’ designs, considered as ‘works’, may be thought of as approaching, but never quite reaching, the value of an ‘art-work’. Iconic designers, equally, may be thought to approach the status of artists but never quite achieving it.

Designing, Theorising, Modelling [Snippets 6]

“[in the UK in the 1970s,] There was a Chinese takeaway in almost every town. They had proliferated in the post-war years as a new wave of Chinese immigrants from Hong Kong took over fish and chip shops, first in Liverpool, then in Manchester and beyond, moving into existing businesses, gradually adding their Chinese dishes to the original menus.” (Dunlop, 2023)

George Saunders (2022) writes that,

“Neuroscientists now suggest that the mind is always doing a form of fiction writing: proposing a broad scale model for the moment that is occurring, then improving that model by way of sensory input. Strangely, this revision process apparently occurs from the back of the brain (broad, early draft) to the front (final product, ie, this moment). The approximate, first-draft model (“This seems to be a restaurant”) gets modified towards greater precision (“A barbecue restaurant that is … in the process of being robbed?”) and then the whole thing may, most truthfully, become a series of unmediated observations (“People running, broken glass, smell of burning meat, man cowering under table holding single French fry”).”

Discourse provocation: Could the insight borrowed from neuroscience by Saunders be extended to suggest that the mind is always doing a form of designing? In this extended sense, the modelling involves theorising inter-relationships among processes of narrating, environing, situating and dramatising.

Designing, Psycho-Semiosis, Bio-Semiosis [Snippets 5]

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Hephzibah Anderson (2022) reviews Rachel Aviv’s first book, Strangers to Ourselves: Stories of Unsettled Minds. The book, according to Anderson, is a subtle and penetrating investigation into how ‘mental illness’ is diagnosed. It brings to attention the ways in which the diagnostic language used is far from neutral. Rather, Aviv suggests, such language, “moulds a patient’s innermost self, promising to explain who they are by weaving narratives that free and entrap” (Anderson, 2022). “There are stories that save us, and stories that trap us,” in the words of Aviv (cited by Kisner, 2022)

Aviv’s book also brings to attention two competing approaches to ‘mental illness’: the Freudian, which endorses introspective therapy to promote ‘understanding’ of the fundamental personal and social maladjustments producing the distress; and the pharmaceutical, which proposes that, for example, depression is a natural, biochemical phenomenon that requires psychopharmacology (Kisner, 2022).

Although not addressed in this snippet, Aviv also discusses the roles that injustice and inequality play in mental distress.