Use for Narrative levels. See also Frame narratives and Embedded narratives
Diegetic levels are also referred to as narrative levels, for example, the English translation of Gerard Genette’s book Narrative Discourse talks of narrative levels. The notion is used to describe the relations between an act of narration and the diégèse, i.e. the story as a whole universe or world.
Following Christian Metz (c1971, 1974: 97-98), diégèse is understood as the spatiotemporal universe or world within which a story takes place. In the case of a cinematic film, Metz’s chosen field of analysis, this means everything which constitutes or belongs to the world projected by the film, and not only visually, i.e. not limited to that which is displayed in the pro-filmic event.
Narrative levels are frequently understood to correspond to narrative framing or embedding. The two notions coincide to some extent, but it is essential to remember that narrative levels extend into areas not generally taken into account in non-narratological discussions of framing and embedding.
References
Genette, G. (1980) Voice, in Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980
Metz, Christian (c1971, 1974). Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
RELATED TERMS: Alienation effect (Verfremdungseffekt); Defamiliarisation, Ostranenie or making strange; Psychogeography; Situationist International
Within the practice of designing narrative environments, détournement may usefully be articulated with ontological metalepsis, as a creative and critical technique.
Détournement is the reuse of preexisting artistic elements in a new ensemble. It has been a constantly present tendency of the contemporary avant-garde, both before and since the formation of the Situationist International.
The two fundamental laws of détournement are the loss of importance of each detourned autonomous element, which may go so far as to lose completely its original sense, and, at the same time, the organisation of another meaningful ensemble that confers on each element its new scope and effect. (Internationale Situationniste, 1959)
Bonnett explains further that detournement involves taking elements from a social stereotype and turning them against it, by means of mutation and reversal, so it is disrupted and exposed as a product of alienation.
This achieves a destabilisation of the spectacle that modern life (i.e. life in the period after the Second World War in Europe) has become, shocking people out of their isolation and passivity. Detournement is a kind of antidote to particular forms of social conditioning.
The Situationists took détournement to be a revitalisation of the Dada and surrealist traditions of the ‘ready-made’ and Andre Breton’s call to divert the object from its ends.
Détournement resembles the ideas of defamiliarisation and estrangement first developed in Modernism, although the Situationists sought to give it a more politically combative than aesthetic accent (Brooker, 2003: 210). It is intended to have a wide potential application, for example, to architectural styles and the built environment, and to everyday situations with their associated gestures, manners and rituals.
In Debord’s theorisation of Situationism, détournement is closely aligned with dérive and psychogeography. Dérive translates literally as drifting but it entails a more active and purposefully disorienting strategy than this suggests. Debord defines dérive as an experimental mode of behaviour linked to the conditions of urban society. It is a technique of transient passage through varied ambiances
The combined effect of the ‘derive’ and ‘detournement’, therefore, is that an urban environment is encountered, as if by an acutely observant stranger, as an event or situation in all its limitations, risks and possibilities . In being newly experienced and perceived, it is thus in effect destabilized, as is the urban mentality of the psychogeographer (Brooker, 2003: 210).
References
Bonnett, A. (1989). Situationism, geography, and poststructuralism. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 7 (2), 131–146.
Brooker, P. (2003). A Glossary of Cultural Theory, 2nd ed. London, UK: Arnold.
Design practices lie at an intersection. They intersect social practices taking place within, while re-shaping, public space; commercial practices taking place within, while re-shaping, global and local marketplaces; spatial practices taking place within, while re-shaping, natural, urban and digital environments; and academic disciplines, taking place within, while re-shaping, the interdisciplinarity of the university.
Being transformative in character, design practices also lie at the intersection of the actual and the virtual, so they are well positioned to incorporate explorations of the changing terrains emerging from the increasing ubiquity of digital technologies that continue to shift perceptions of the boundaries among the real, the artificial and the natural, a condition that requires not just (critical) reflection but also heightened awareness of the consequential outcomes of reflexive action and interaction.
Buchanan (1998: 64) considers the development of design practices in the 20th century to have had three distinct periods,
“Design began as a trade activity, closely connected to industrialization and the emergence of mass communication. After a period of time, professions began to emerge, with traditions of practice and conscious recognition of a distinct type of thinking and working that distinguished our professions from others. Professional practice diversified in many forms – in a process that continues to the present. However, we are now witnessing the beginnings of the third era of design, marked by the emergence of design as a field or discipline.”
It is through and against this emerging field or discipline that design practices may be developed with theoretical, political, and philosophical cohesion. Design practices might then be capable of mediating, as Lohtaja (2021: 2) puts it, “fundamental concerns about the human condition and ways of being together; issues traditionally associated with political theory and political philosophy.”
Design practices, as they developed in an Anglo-Saxon context, are closely tied to the development of functionalism and the Modern Movement (Burkhardt, 1988: 145-146). In this tradition, the design of objects was conceived on the model of architecture. Specialisation within the field of design did not take place until the latter half of the 19th century in England and, subsequently, in Germany, followed progressively by France, the USA, Scandinavia, Italy and Japan.
At the time of its rise to prominence, the notion of functionalism served a particular purpose. The above-mentioned Anglo-Saxon tradition involved a certain ethical project: to restore to the object its ‘truth’ and ‘honesty’. That was interpreted to mean that it had some ‘intrinsic’ value in this world (this-worldly-value), and was not just a cipher for a value in an other world (other-worldly-value). This was a reaction to prevalent historicist ideas which relegated objects to the realm of appearances (accidence) rather than reality (essence). The leading advocates of this position, who effected functionalism’s rise to pre-eminence, were Webb, Lethaby, Voysey, Ashbee in England; Muthesius and Riemerschmid in Germany; Wagner and Loos in Austria; and Sullivan in the USA (Burkhardt, 1988: 146).
[Aside: From another perspective, such notions as ‘truth to materials’ and ‘intrinsic value’ might be understood as a rejection of the reduction of the ‘object’, or the output of design, to its commodity status with an emphasis on its exchange value to the detriment of its use value, to use terms that Marx introduced in order to articulate the ‘revaluation of all values’ taking place through the emergence of the industrialisation of production and urbanisation of social living conditions under capitalism. The question here concerns criteria for ‘valuation’ and ‘revaluation’ within specific historical periods, with due attention, first, to the potential slippage between the use of the term value in political economy, on the one hand, and in ethical and culture, on the other hand; and, second, to the role of design practices in facilitating this potential slippage.]
These thinkers considered the relationships among form, function and material, insisting that they be interpreted in a cultural perspective, taking into account contemporary life-styles and aspirations. They were also closely linked to the leading artistic movements of the time and therefore had an aesthetic orientation.
With the growth of specialisation, the relationship between design and architecture became more tenuous. Design came to see itself linked to systems of industrial production and economic growth. It therefore took on a very pragmatic approach, a form of industrialised, instrumentalised, econo-pragmatism. Design began to assume a key role in economic policy, as an instrument in the quest for market share and for the satisfaction of national ambition in the display of sovereign power.
Thus, design came to mean a commitment to mass production, with an industrial logic. Ironically, in the context of the forms of contemporary design where, technically, each category of product is much the same, design enters as a means of differentiating products at the level of appearances, in the form of brand identity.
Design, in this phase, is reduced to styling and designers to employees in companies within which they have little autonomy. To break with this situation, they would require greater institutional autonomy and the necessary conceptual equipment. Early examples of attempts to break free from the constraints of functionalism and econo-pragmatism include the ecological and pacifist movements in the USA in the 1960s, the Des-In group in Germany, the counter-design movement centred on the work of Ettore Sottsass and the Florentine Archizoom group. Later developments include the creation of the Alchimia group in 1978 by Ettore Sotsass, Andrea Branzi and Alessandro Mendini and Sottsass’s Memphis Group in 1980.
Nevertheless, these remain minority tendencies. For the majority tendency,
“ …this notion of an everyday culture, of culture as a means to emancipation, allowing people to distance themselves from the world and take a critical look at it – this barely exists at all in the Anglo-Saxon world, where designers are closely linked with industry, and where design associations occupy themselves not with critical discussion but merely with business problems.” (Burkhardt, 1988: 149)
What remains, then, in part, is to strengthen the case for the notion of an everyday culture which permits critical distancing; and for a critique of functionalism, not as such, but to combat its hegemonic ascendancy and assumptions concerning its instrumental simplicity. In this way, as Burkhardt (1988: 151) expresses it,
“Any object can be an object of design, and their multiplicity of evocations should correspond to the multiple possibilities which our society offers of identification and identity.”
Burkhardt, F. (1988). Design and ‘avant-postmodernism’. In: Thakara, J., ed. Design after modernism. London, UK: Thames and Hudson, 145–151.
Lohtaja, A. (2021) Designing dissensual common sense: critical art, architecture, and design in Jacques Rancière’s political thought, Design and Culture. Routledge, pp. 1–20. doi: 10.1080/17547075.2021.1966730.
The design of narrative environments, as a field of practice, is an example of research-led or research-informed designing. It may also be a means of or an element in practising design-led research.
Although in some respects similar to post-structuralist literary and cultural theories, the design of narrative environments differs significantly from them in stressing the complex relational materiality of designed entities. The design of narrative environments emphasises the constructed, mediated, performative and immersive character of our experiences. It is concerned with the configurations of the world (or worlds) that circumvents us, the ‘circumverse’, as Tiqqun (2010) calls it, and the ways in which they configure us.
It may be of value in thinking about the design of narrative environments, as a particular kind of, or approach to design, to consider it in relation to design history. It may also be worth considering whether in narrating a particular design history one is also articulating a design theory, a theory of what design is through a history of what one is arguing it has been.
For example, in writing their history of design, Claudia Mareis and Nina Paim (2021) highlight the problematic and violent legacies of design practices. The essays in the volume they have edited show how contemporary struggles to rework the material and conceptual logics of design practices are made difficult by the recognition that design practices and design thinking are deeply complicit in many structural systems of oppression which serve to materialise, perpetuate and disseminate power and privilege. Thus, Mareis and Paim (2021: 11) argue that,
“Historically, Western design as a professional and academic field has been a narrow and exclusive domain that often imagines itself as universal. Striving to define ideals and norms, the modernist lineage of design has proved largely ignorant of its all-pervasive anthropocentrism and exclusionary assumptions, projecting a vision of the world largely defined by a small number of mostly white, male, cisgender designers in the Global North.”
Lauren Williams (2019) takes a different tack in exploring the same terrain. She writes:
“the origins of neoliberalism, racism, and design, and benchmarks the confluence of their histories in the United States in the 1960s, a decade which reconfigured and drew these systems even closer together over the following four decades. These shifts preceded a rapid move toward neoliberal de-politicization and privatization; they paved the way for post-raciality (the notion that racism is extinct); and set up the advent of Design Thinking and the primacy of empathy, its operative element … Racism and design have always supported capitalism, but as neoliberalization drives innovations on both, post-raciality and Design Thinking emerge, respectively, as new formations.”
These are both histories and theories of design which bring to attention the ontological, epistemological and axiological, that is, philosophical, assumptions made by the historian-as-researcher-as-situated-theorist. Historical and theoretical narratives are intertwined, with the purpose, in this case, of showing the role of design both in world-building and, through those same processes, of simultaneously making exclusions from the world or worlds that are built, rendering many beings worldless, to use Vegso’s (2020) term.
RELATED TERMS: Alienation effect – Verfremdungseffekt; Avant-garde movements; Defamiliarisation, Ostranenie or making strange; Detournement; Method and methodology; Psychogeography; Situationist International
In Debord’s theorisation of Situationism, dérive, détournement and psychogeography are closely aligned practices. Dérive translates literally as drifting but it is a more active and purposefully disorienting strategy than this rather neutral term suggests. Debord defines derive as an experimental mode of behaviour linked to the conditions of urban society and the urban environment. It is a technique of transient passage through varied ambiances, according to Debord.
The combined effect of the ‘dérive’ and ‘détournement’ is that an urban environment is encountered, as if by an acutely observant stranger, as an event or situation in all its limitations, risks and possibilities. In being newly experienced and perceived, it is thus in effect destabilised, as is the urban mentality of the psychogeographer (Brooker, 2003: 210).
References
Brooker, P. (2003). A Glossary of Cultural Theory, 2nd ed. London, UK: Arnold.
RELATED TERMS: Interaction; Interaction design; Taxonomy
Paul Dourish (2004) brings to attention Matthew Chalmers’ observation that computer science is based on philosophical assumptions and arguments that were prevalent before the 1930s. Dourish continues,
“Computer-science in practice involves reducing high-level behaviors to low-level, mechanical explanations, formalizing them through pure scientific rationality; in this, computer science reveals its history as part of a positivist, reductionist tradition. Similarly, much of contemporary cognitive science is based on a rigorous Cartesian separation between mind and matter, cognition and action. These are philosophical positions of long standing, dating from the nineteenth century or earlier.”
This dualist, positivist, reductionist philosophical approach has been questioned by the phenomenological approaches of, for example, Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein, as well as other 20th-century philosophers. Such phenomenological questioning informs the embodied interaction approach to human interaction with software systems.
The phenomenological tradition, by emphasising the primacy of social practice over abstract cognition in everyday activity, can shed light on the foundational underpinnings of current research on embodied interaction. Such approaches, extended through what has been called post-phenomenological research into technologies, for example as pursued by Don Ihde (2009, 2010), can be of value for the design of narrative environments, not just those which are digital or which incorporate a digital component.
References
Dourish, P. (2004) Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Ihde, D. (2009) ‘What Is postphenomenology?’, in Postphenomenology and Technoscience: The Peking University Lectures. New York, NY: State University of New York Press, pp. 5–23.
Ihde, D. (2010) Heidegger’s technologies: postphenomenological perspectives. New York, NY: Fordham University Press.
Ken Garland wrote and proclaimed the First Things First manifesto in 1963 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. It was first published in January 1964. Co-signed by 21 colleagues, the manifesto proposed that design effort should re-directed, away from advertising towards more worthwhile, purposeful activities.
A second version, entitled First Things First 2000, was published in autumn 1999, appearing simultaneously in Adbusters, AIGA Journal and Emigre in North America, Eye and Blueprint in the UK and Items in the Netherlands. It later also appeared in Form magazine in Germany. Having a similar structure to Garland’s original, it widened its target to include not just advertising but also marketing and brand development.
The response to this version was polarised, and many in the design industry were angered by the tone of the criticism. As an example, Poynor (2021) cites Pentagram partner Michael Bierut’s riposte for I.D. Magazine, “A Manifesto with Ten Footnotes.”
In 2014, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first appearance of First Things First, Cole Peters decided to launch a third version, this time with an emphasis on design in the digital realm. Cole was prompted by Edward Snowden’s disclosures about governmental abuse of communications technologies to consider the question of how culpable were designers in abetting the technological apparatus that was feeding on personal data and surveillance, an apparatus whose appeal was often enhanced through design.
A fourth, online version, First Things First 2020, was written by Namita Dharia, Marc O’Brien and Ben Gaydos. It includes “a checklist of urgent design goals, covering the histories and ethics of design, community-based initiatives, non-exploitative social relations, nature as a complex system, and reconnecting design and manufacturing to the Earth and its people” (Poynor, 2021).
“…the pharmakon of writing is good for hypomnesis (re-memoration, recollection, consignation) and not for mneme (living, knowing memory) that Thamus, in the Phaedrus, condemns … as being of little worth.”
Derrida, J. (1981). Dissemination. London, UK: Athlone Press, p.91
According to Christopher Johnson (2013), Bernard Stiegler reformulates the governing theme of Derrida’s Of Grammatology, which is the question of the repression of writing in Western metaphysics, in terms of the repression of technology.
Incomplete … takes these Derridean and Stieglerian insights seriously. Both Derrida’s ‘writing’ and Stiegler’s ‘technology’ are understood as metaphors for mnemotechne, as forms of material ‘reminders’ in the process of hypomnesis, rememoration.
Thus, whereas it was a question of the repression of writing in Derrida and the repression of technology in Stiegler, Incomplete … reformulates the question in terms of the repression of design. Mnemotechne, Frances Joseph (2010) suggests, may be the oldest name for design.
Design, as pharmakon, that is, both remedy and poison, is good for hypomnesis and, in so acting, alters the character of collective cultural memory and embodied or ‘living’ mneme, the two other forms of ‘memory’ outlined by Stiegler.
The emphasis upon mnemotechne is a means of asserting that memory and thought (remembering and thinking) are fundamentally related to the inorganic through the world’s materiality. Design reminds [and re-minds, re-configures mind].
Design: Hypomnesis, Mnemotechne, Praxis and Cognition
Taking this into account, ‘exosomatism’ can be re-interpreted as the theory of the co-evolution of society and ‘design’ of various orders and complexity; not a socio-technical system but a socio-design system. The diverse aspects of design as practice (pragmata,poiesis and praxis) and as pedagogy (theoria, doxa, gnosis, phronesis, nous, sophia, episteme) come together as mnemotechne. Design as practice and pedagogy thus weave together discourse, technology, thing, medium and environment to constitute economic and ecological spaces and places for ongoing socio-cultural and socio-political practice.
A multiple repression is taking place, giving rise to a hierarchy: episteme, absolute knowledge or pure knowledge, knowledge of absolutes, whether as forms or ideas, was privileged, with speech accepted as giving the most immediate access to such knowledge. Speech is therefore privileged over writing, as Derrida argues, but ‘writing’, if it is not just to be a textual metaphor, takes on various guises, such as ‘technology’ as Stiegler suggests. ‘Writing’ is manifested as scientific knowledge, technical knowledge, art knowledge (aesthetics) and media knowledge, each of which, in different ways, obscures the importance of ‘design’ as practice and as pedagogy. So-called ‘indigenous’ knowledge is equally involved in the ‘writing’ and the ‘re-writing’ of the human through the natural and against the natural, and vice versa, that is to say the ‘designing’ and ‘re-designing’ of the world.
This multiple repression is enacted historically at various points in time, for example, to favour art (ars, aesthetics) [in the Renaissance and 18th century], on the one hand, and technology (techne, science) [in the 19th and 20th centuries], on the other hand, over ‘design’ as a practice of mediation and intervention.
In parallel to this approach, ‘design’ as planning, or more specifically projecting, the future or forward orientation of ‘design’, should be taken into account. One line of thought here, going back beyond Derrida and Stiegler to Heidegger, is opened up by the leeway provided by different translations of entwurf: John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Heidegger, 1962: 185) note that, “The basic meaning of this noun [entwurf] and the cognate verb ‘entwerfen’ is that of ‘throwing’ something ‘off’ or ‘away’ from one; but in ordinary German usage, and often in Heidegger, they take on the sense of ‘designing’ or ‘sketching’ some ‘project’ which is to be carried through…”
Stiegler on Leroi Gourhan and Derrida. Source: Stiegler, B. (2002) Derrida and technology: fidelity at the limits of deconstruction and the prosthesis of faith.
“Let me quickly recall here that in Husserlian thought three types of memory have to be distinguished, the first two of which pertain to consciousness, the third constituting an external trace, something like an “objective” memory. It is in the work of the French paleontologist Leroi-Gourhan that this problematic of the exteriorization of memory, that is of a non-psychological memory, one that is neither psychological nor biological, is taken up. Thus, just as Leroi-Gourhan will place at the center of his analyses of hominization the concepts of “program” (organizations of memory) and processes of “exteriorization,” so these concepts will to a large extent release the next stage in Derrida’s thought represented by Of Grammatology. Leroi-Gourhan shows:
that it is impossible to dissociate anthropogenesis from technogenesis,
that technogenesis pursues the conquest of mobility, that is, of life, by means other than life,
that, accordingly, the difference between human- and animal-kind is to be rethought,
that the technical exteriorization of the living marks the origin of humanity,
that the technical object constitutes as such a memory support (as well as the condition of what Plato calls “hypomnesis”),
that, for these reasons, language and instrumentality are two aspects of the same phenomenon.
“The “logic of the supplement” – as a logic of prosthesis that shows the “truth” of the “inside” to be (in) the outside in which it exteriorizes itself – makes the opposition inside/outside redundant. Leroi-Gourhan can only speak of “exteriorization” to the extent that what exteriorizes itself (the “interior,”“life becoming conscious of itself”) is constituted by its very exteriorization. This is something that the reading of Plato’s Phaedrus also elaborates in terms of the logic of hypomnesis and is already made explicit in “Freud and the scene of writing” as the indissolubility of memory and technics.”
Translator’s note in Stiegler chapter, p.264:
“For Plato, there are two kinds of memory: mneme and hypomnesis. The first is within the psyche, is active, and alive, and characterizes the type of questioning and reflecting that, for Plato, marks proper knowing; the second is a type of rememoration dependent on external supports and supplements (a clay- or wax-board, a scroll, a blackboard, a computer, or a handkerchief) that characterizes the type of knowing that is secondary and technical and, ultimately, haunted by death. For Plato, this opposition is eminently an ethical one between two types of responsibility, the one active and autonomous, the other passive and heteronomous: for Derrida, this opposition is the very institution of metaphysical philosophizing and constitutes the site of a violent desire to remove from the structure of the psyche the trace of supplementarity. Hence the importance of this text for understanding the reach of Derrida’s philosophy and the interest of Stiegler’s intense focus on this instituting moment.” – Trans. note.
Design, Disegno, Drawing
Furthermore, a cluster of concepts may need to be considered around disegno and drawing, to open up the relationship between ‘writing’ and ‘design’ through the relation between writing and drawing or writing and carving, inscription and engraving; the play around the notion of drawing out as sketching, as poiesis (making as creating, perhaps even as inventing) and as abstraction, as well as the notion of drawing up a plan or a project.
Design, Fingere, Fiction
A further cluster of concepts may also need to be examined, around the etymology of fiction. Design as fictum, derived from fingere, meaning to shape, fashion, form, mould, devise or feign is in this sense a fashioning and shaping of events (Shields, 2010, section 20), but which also opens to the possibility of the feigning of events and to deception, connotations which remain attached to the notion of design as ‘artificial’.
Design, Entwurf,Entwerpen
There is a yet further cluster of concepts around the German terms Entwurf and Entwerpen, as they are used in Heidegger and subsequent writers. This concerns the conception of design as a process of ‘throwing open’; of ‘throwing-ahead’ or projecting; and of ‘un-throwing’ or ‘throwing off’ what has already been thrown’. There is also the question of design’s prolonging of the state or condition of thrownness through its semiotic materiality. In other words, design may over-throw and/or re-throw, through interpretation and re-making. Design is a process of projective (re-)making and (re-)turning.
Notes
“In Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus, one finds an elucidation of this state of affairs in the belief that technical and externalized memory, in this case alphabetic writing, in its function as an aide to memory – as a material “reminder” (hypomnēsis) – exerts a negative influence upon us by propagating and enforcing a captivation with sensuous things; with what constitutes, on this view, the mere copies of more original immaterial forms (274d-77a). By not, in other words, channelling our attention inwards and towards the ideal – by not activating the living memory of “the word which is written with intelligence in the mind of the learner”, but merely presenting us with the dead and “external characters” of what is invisible and primordial (276a, 275a) – everyday occupational chains of operations – like the work of a builder, and the material tools employed in such practice, like hammers and nails – were, in extension of this, not merely grasped as a position opposed to a more originary point of view, but was seen as constituting a genuine hindrances for its attainment. For Plato, as Stiegler writes; “Hypomnēsis [being reminded] is technics in general. It is as opposed to anamnēsis [recollecting] as body is to the soul” (2007: 24).” (Nielsen, 2017)
References
Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. p.185, footnote
Johnson, C. (2013) The Prehistory of technology: on the contribution of Leroi-Gourhan, in Howell, C. and Moore, G. (eds) Stiegler and Technics. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 34–52.
Nielsen, M. A. (2017) What makes us who we are? On the relationship between human existence and technics, thinking and technology, and the philosopher and the technician [MPhil thesis]. Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas, Faculty of Humanities, University of Oslo.
Shields, D. (2011) Reality hunger: a manifesto. New York, NY: Vintage Books.
Stiegler, B. (2002) Derrida and technology: fidelity at the limits of deconstruction and the prosthesis of faith. In Cohen, T. (ed.) (2002) Jacques Derrida and the humanities: a critical reader. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp.238-270.
RELATED TERMS: Modernism; Avant-garde movements; Socially engaged art; Critical thinking; Agonism and avant-gardism; Dissensus – Ranciere
Design practice has long been influenced by art practice, and vice versa, for example, the minimalism of the 1960s and 1970s influenced graphic and industrial design, in one direction, while modernist art of the early 20th century incorporated designed artefacts from everyday life into its artworks and pop art explicitly took commercial art themes and icons and re-contextualised them within the institutional gallery system of fine art, in the other direction. Elements of art practice and design practices are, by the early 21st century, well and truly intertwined, which does not mean that they are equivalent.
The practice of designing a narrative environment, then, may incorporate techniques, devices and concepts from art practice directly or indirectly and/or consciously or unconsciously. It is as well, then, to be aware of the relationship between modernist and avant-garde art practices, as this distinction bears upon the question of whether a specific art practice, and by analogy a specific design practice, is separate from society and self-referential or is socially relevant, whether critically or conventionally, and integrated with society.
Jochen Schulte-Sasse (1984: xii) points out that Peter Burger (1984) does not accept the argument presented within the Anglophone cultural history tradition that there was a radical turning point in the mid-19th century, after which a scepticism towards language marked the beginning of modernism, as an important demarcation in art history. By setting the avant-garde within the broad context of cultural politics and the consciousness industry, and by seeing the chances to use the ruptures within this system, as Burger does, a more full understanding of the avant-garde can be obtained. Thus, Burger reconstructs literary history from the development of autonomous literature in bourgeois culture during the period of classicism and romanticism in the 18th century and early 19th century through to the turn to Aestheticism/modernism and on to the avant-garde.
In the Anglophone tradition, the modernist writer of ‘high’ literature no longer refers positively to society by presenting norms and values critically. Rather, the modernist writer attacks the ossification of society and its language. By this definition, in plot construction in modernist literature a writer no longer tacitly assumes that there is a rational structure in human conduct, that this structure can be ascertained and that doing so enables the writer to lend his work a specific order. Assumptions concerning human conduct, rationality, sequence and order are put in question: there is no secure or preordained meaning in the action portrayed. The reader remains uncertain as to the possibilities or horizons of meaning.
The Anglophone tradition holds that from the mid-19th century onwards, beginning with Flaubert, this sceptical tendency becomes predominant. Burger finds in this Anglophone debate about modernism an assumption that obscures the much more radical shift from Aestheticism to the historical avant-garde at the beginning of the 20th century.
For Burger, the developing scepticism toward language and the change in relation of form and content that characterised Symbolism and Aestheticism was inherent in the developmental logic of the institution of ‘art’ from the beginning, i.e. from the beginning of the specific institutionalisation of the commerce with art in bourgeois society. Even if the autonomous art of bourgeois culture in the late 18th century criticised society through its contents, it was separated through its form from the mainstream of society.
In Burger’s view, the development leading to Symbolism and Aestheticism is best described as a transformation of form into content, whereby art becomes a problem for itself as form becomes the content of art works, such that the predominant feature of modernist or aestheticism art is that it calls attention to its own material means and media. In other words, the apartness from the praxis of life that constituted the institutional status of art in bourgeois society became the content of works.
The passage from the autonomy of art in the 18th century to the Aestheticism of the late 19th century and early 20th century is, for Burger, a process of intensification of art’s separateness from bourgeois society. In so arguing, Burger departs from the history of the avant-garde in the Anglophone tradition. For Burger, the tendency inherent in art’s autonomous status drove the individual work and the art institution to increasingly extreme declarations of their autonomy. The increasing consciousness of writing techniques and the aesthetic sensitising of art’s audience lead, for Burger, to art works that are characterised by semantic atrophy.
Burger sees no purpose in valorising the purely aesthetic experience that motivates Aestheticist texts. Rather, his contention is that aestheticist art severs itself consistently from all social relevance, establishing itself as a medium of purely aesthetic experience in which ‘content’ withers as the artist/writer turns her/his attention in upon the medium and materiality of her/his own craft.
The development, i.e. the intensification of separation, is the historical precondition for the further development of art at the beginning of the 20th century. Thus, Burger argues, aestheticism’s intensification of artistic autonomy and its effect upon the foundation of a special realm of aesthetic experience prompted the avant-garde to recognise clearly the social inconsequentiality of autonomous art and, in consequence of this recognition, to try to lead art back into social praxis.
It can be seen, then, that for Burger the development of the avant-garde has nothing to do with a critical consciousness about language. It is not, Burger suggests, simply a continuation of processes already present in Aestheticism.
The turning point from Aestheticism to the avant-garde is determined by the extent to which art comprehended its own status in bourgeois society. The historical avant-garde of the 1920s was the first movement in art history to turn against the art institution itself and the mode in which art’s autonomy functions. By doing so, the avant-garde differed from all previous art movements, whose mode of existence was determined precisely by an acceptance of autonomy and exceptionality. Avant-garde artists actively attacked the institution of art not in an effort to isolate themselves but to reintegrate themselves and their art into life.
Burger shows that the avant-garde’s attack upon art as an institution in bourgeois society was not only designed to destroy this institution but also permitted its existence and significance to become perceptible in the first place. Burger demonstrates that the historical analysis of the social functioning of past art, i.e. its institution, became possible only when, first, the historical unfolding of this institution had reached its end in the radical separation of aestheticist or modernist art from society; and, second, when, due to this development, the avant-garde could attack the institution of art.
The equation of the terms ‘modernism’ and ‘avant-garde’ stems from an inability to see that the theoretical emphases of modernist and avant-garde artists/writers are radically different. Modernism may be understandable as an attack on traditional writing techniques, notably the tendency of realism to use conventional language patterns, but the avant-garde can only be understood as an attack intended to alter the institutionalised commerce with art.
Thus, Schulte-Sasse stresses, Burger goes beyond those who argue that the key point in the development of modern art was the shift to aestheticism, i.e. modernism, from realism, through his insistence on the importance of the avant-garde’s attack on the institution of art. Burger pursues his argument by highlighting the distinction between the institutional role of art and the concept of the work of art which inhabits a privileged domain apart from society.
By showing how the institution ‘art’ mediated art with bourgeois society, Burger makes clear that the institution itself, and no transcendental concept of the work of art, serves as the essence of art in precise, historical, and recoverable, ways. Nevertheless, for Burger, as for Marcuse and Habermas, art holds a precarious, ambiguous position in bourgeois society. Art can both protest and protect the status quo. In radicalising its autonomy from other aspects of society, art gave rise to a counterculture that was hostile to the possessive-individualistic achievement- and advantage-oriented lifestyle of the bourgeoisie. In this radicalised, autonomous art, the bourgeoisie had to recognise the negation rather than the complement of its social practice.
Anglophone criticism, in exaggerating the significance of the shift from realism to aestheticism (modernism) so much, neglects or insufficiently appreciates the important effort of avant-garde praxis to destroy the shell of the no-longer-beautiful illusion in order to make art pass de-sublimated over into life. In consequence most Anglophone criticism has lost sight of the goal the avant-garde set up for itself.
Avant-garde artists were not just reacting to society with pseudo-existentialist passions of the soul. Nor were they simply reacting to society with efforts to break up and dislodge prevalent styles. Anglophone theories of modernism, Schulte-Sasse argues, emphasised the pathos but not the praxis of modern artists. Schulte-Sasse suggests that French poststructuralist models of modernism may have a similar emphasis.
Unlike modernist art, Burger insists that avant-garde aesthetic praxis aimed to intervene in social reality. The avant-garde recognised that the organic unity of the bourgeois institution of art left art impotent to intervene in social life. The avant-garde therefore developed a different concept of the work of art which permitted the possibility of reinterpreting art into social praxis if artists would create unclosed, individual segments of art that open themselves to supplementary responses.
References
Burger, P. (1984). Theory of the avant-garde. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Schulte-Sasse, J. (1984). Foreword: theory of modernism versus theory of the avant-garde. In Theory of the avant-garde,by Peter Burger, translated by Michael Shaw. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, vii-xivii.
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