Tragic Theatre – Aristotle

The importance of tragic theatre for design practices is threefold. First, it places great importance on plot construction and the effects upon the audience that such plotting can achieve. Second, it emphasises the importance of engaging an audience empathically, in relation to plot construction, in the context of moral and intellectual education. Third, like drama, the narrative in a design is embodied and enacted, woven into an experiential, intercorporeal, spatio-temporal framing. Much, therefore, can be learned about design practices from the construction of a drama. Engagement with and participation in a design, like drama, involves the weaving together of emotional and intellectual responses, together with reflection upon those responses.

The Western tradition of dramatic construction has been dominated by the Aristotelian conception of tragic drama. This was critically re-articulated by Bertolt Brecht, through his conception of epic theatre; and by Antonin Artaud, with his conception of a theatre of cruelty. The Aristotelian model has been further destabilised through the disruption of plot by the insertion of elements of reflexivity, the inclusion of devices that point to the deliberate constructedness or artificiality of the drama’s narrative, such as in the theatre of the absurd, and by the implications this has for the participant/audience.

Tragic theatre, as conceived by Aristotle, then, is important not just for its emphasis on plotting but also for its concern with the emotional and intellectual effects upon the participants and the proximity or distance which the participants are granted in relation to the narrative events unfolding. A number of questions may arise from adopting the Aristotelian approach to drama, and hence to designing. For example, there is the question, firstly, of whether it encourages critical thinking on the part of the audience, or simply delivers aesthetic pleasure as an end in itself, through catharsis; secondly, whether it permits an understanding of the social conditions of the protagonist’s actions, rather that a narrow focus on individual decision-making and action within a universal, ideal conception of the human condition; and, thirdly, whether the emphasis on emotional engagement helps or hinders the audience’s intellectual understanding of the drama’s significance and meanings.

Greek tragedy was a popular and influential form of drama performed in theatres across ancient Greece from the late 6th century BCE (Cartwright, 2013). Working inductively, Aristotle developed his theorisation of tragic theatre from the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides.

Aristotle’s theorisation of tragic theatre is framed by wider debates in the Ancient Greek world about the role of the art-work (poiesis, making; and the work as poietic production) and the emotions in moral and intellectual education. The central issue for tragic theatre is whether emotional engagement with the characters in the drama help or hinder the audience’s critical intellectual reflections on the characters and situations represented in the work. For Plato, the emotions that tragedy evokes in the audience disables them intellectually and leads them astray morally (Curran, 2001: 167). Aristotle, at least in the interpretation of his work proffered by Martha Nussbaum and Stephen Halliwell, values tragic drama because it elicits emotions that work in conjunction with a cognitive understanding of ourselves as human beings and of the world in which we live (Curran, 2001: 167-168).

Curran (2001) brings into sharp focus Aristotle’s view, first, that plots must feature the individual error of an otherwise morally admirable protagonist; and, second, that engaging with the thoughts and feelings of the tragic protagonist is central to responding to tragedy. These practices, as Aristotle describes them, do not permit drama that is socially critical, unless they are supplemented by other devices that link the action of the protagonist to a larger social nexus. In this respect, Brecht’s recommendations for dramatic construction are useful for supplementing the potential failings in Aristotle’s preferred dramatic practices.

For Aristotle, tragedy has a final purpose or end, i.e. telos, which is to be an imitation or representation, i.e. mimesis, of action and human life. While Aristotle links mimesis to similarity, he argues, against Plato, that the artist-playwright does not just copy the shifting appearances of the world. Rather, the artist-playwright imitates or represents reality itself, and gives form and meaning to that reality. This mimesis is associated by Aristotle with a characteristic pleasure, that of experiencing the catharsis, i.e. relief from or purification of the pity and fear evoked by the tragic events. In addition, response to mimetic works involves, for Aristotle, a certain kind of emotional or intellectual learning. Aristotle does not elaborate upon this learning nor, indeed, does he expand in detail upon what catharsis involves.

While Aristotle distinguishes six elements of tragedy, i.e. plot, characters, verbal expression, thought, visual adornment and song-composition, the basic principle of tragedy for Aristotle is plot, or the imitation (mimesis) of action. For an action to be tragic, it must incorporate features capable of eliciting pity and fear to effect a catharsis of these emotions in the audience. Aristotle evaluates plot construction on the basis of which plot patterns best evoke the emotions of pity and fear. Aristotle’s account of tragedy and why it affects the audience appeals to a universal essence of human nature, such that the definition of certain events will elicit a response of pity and fear in anyone who witnesses the dramatisation.

Aristotle’s approach to tragedy is therefore essentialist in two respects: it is based on an account of plot as the inherent nature of tragedy; and it assumes a universal or idealised spectator, who will respond with pity and fear when witnessing the appropriately depicted suffering of the tragic protagonist. The best tragic plots in Aristotle’s view are those which show harm occurring, or about to occur, to kin or loved ones due to the tragic character’s not knowing what he or she is doing. In other words, as a result of the character’s falling unwittingly into error.

In Aristotle’s ideal tragic drama, then, the protagonist is basically a good person, a person ‘intermediate in virtue’ (Curran, 2001: 174), who brings about, or threatens to bring about, his or her own misfortune and those of his or her kin or loved ones, but who acts in ignorance of what he or she is doing. The suffering brought about is disproportionately greater than any error the character might have committed. It it is this incommensurability which allows the audience to feel pity and fear for him or her, a protagonist who, as ‘someone like ourselves’, we, the audience, can empathise and sympathise.

As a caveat, it should be noted that Aristotle draws on the class and gender hierarchies outlined in his Politics, such that, in his view, the goodness of a woman should be represented as inferior and the sufferings of a slave are not worthy of representation at all. In other words, tragic characters, for Aristotle, are male and are members of the aristoi or the oligoi, the noble or the wealthy classes.

References

Aristotle (2000). The Poetics of Aristotle, translated by H. Butcher. Pennsylvania, PA: Pennsylvania State University.

Cartwright, M. (2013). Greek tragedy. Ancient History Encyclopedia. Available from http://www.ancient.eu/Greek_Tragedy/ [Accessed 19 March 2016].

Curran, A. (2001). Brecht’s criticisms of Aristotle’s aesthetics of tragedy. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 59 (2), 167–184. Available from http://www.jstor.org/stable/432222 [Accessed 25 June 2016].

Pedagogic journeys 1. Tragic drama as narrative, learning environment

Robert Rauschenberg, Personal fetish, Rome, 1953

This post complements a previous one on Modes of human actantiality, developing the implications of the work of Amelie Oksenberg Rorty for design practices in respect of the human dimensions of such designs. A design, especially if it is conceived as a narrative, learning environment, is a pedagogic journey, but it is not a simple passage from ignorance to knowledge. It may, indeed, be a process of unlearning, starting from a position of what has already been learned, and is presumed to be known: that into which one has been thrown. This process of unlearning leads to a means of learning otherwise in terms of ‘how’, ‘what’ and ‘why’. Another way of putting this, perhaps, is that ignorance and knowledge have many forms and are not mutually exclusive opposites.

It might be said that Western concepts of pedagogy, education and knowledge focus on character (ethe) [1] on ‘knowing oneself’ as ‘knowing how to act’ by knowing the plot, script or curriculum in which one has a role or plays a part, but a part apart, abstracted from the flow of events, a spectatorial or speculative way of knowing. This emphasis on co-implicated character and plot in pedagogy, education and knowledge is key to Western understanding of ethics and politics which are, for this reason, among others, constituted as narrative, learning environments.
Nevertheless, such character-plot focus still has the potential to open up to a recognition of the ‘essential’ or ‘vital’ relationality of pedagogy, knowledge and education, particularly when the notion of character is opened up to the structural relations of protagonist/antagonist and protagonist/amorist and related roles, such as helper and opponent, in the agonistic and erotic, i.e. relational, unfolding of the field of dynamic interaction, highlighting our existence as inter-related parts of ‘knowing’ and ‘belonging’ to ‘networks’ or ‘systems’ or ‘families’ or ‘communities’, at whatever scale.

Tragic dramas in the classical Greek mode show both the perils of going off-script, but, ironically, still within a well-plotted narrative, showing the devastation of erroneous waywardness (hamartia), but also of the lack of a guarantee that by staying on-script one has understood or knows ‘properly’ (to use an inadequate word) who one is. That is, tragic dramas point to the limits of self-knowledge, which is altered by changing the context in which such self-knowing, through action, takes place and is recognised.

The notion of changing context, symbolised through anagnorisis (moment of startling discovery, sudden movement from ignorance to knowledge), itself opens up to the notions of chance and contingency, as well as those of opportunity and opportunism and fortune and fortuitousness, but this, as Amelie Rorty (1992) explains, does not mean that its ethical lessons are primarily about the place of accident and fortune or fortuitousness in the unfolding of human life.

Plot and self-knowledge

A plot connects the incidents that compose it in three ways: causally; thematically; and by demonstrating the connections between the protagonist’s character, his thought and his actions (Rorty, 1992: 8).

Causally, the events of the plot are straightforwardly, simply and strongly linked. They are shown to happen because of one another. These causal connections must be necessary, or nearly so, as necessary as human actions can be, in order to link the events in a well-ordered whole and to elicit pity and fear.

The simplest types of thematic connection are repetition and ironic reversal. For example, Antigone lived to bury her dead; her punishment was to be buried alive. However, since she deliberately did what she knew to be punishable by death, she took her own life in the tomb where Creon had condemned her. Such patterned closures as this give thematic unity to a drama.

The unity of a plot is manifest in the way that each protagonist’s fundamental character traits are expressed in all that he thinks, says and does.
In the best plots, the peripeteia of action, i.e. the moment that reverses the protagonist’s fortunes, coincides with insightful recognition, i.e. anagnorisis (Rorty, 1992: 12), the startling discovery that produces a change from ignorance to knowledge. As Rorty comments, it is significant that this recognition typically fulfills the ancient command to ‘know oneself’ (gnothi season). She further explains that to know who one is, is to know how to act. Knowing how to act involves understanding of one’s obligations and what is important in one’s interactions (Rorty, 1992: 11). The cancer at the heart of the tragic protagonist’s hamartia, or erring waywardness, often involves his [sic] not knowing who he is, his ignorance of his real identity.

Action and character

Although tragedy, according to Aristotle, is about action and not character, the two are coordinate.

Character is expressed in choice (prohairesis) and choice determines action. Character is individuated and articulated in choice and thoughtful action. Life is action and activity. Tragic theatre represents serious action. It is also a dramatic representation of the way that the protagonist’s character is expressed through his choices and actions, which affect the way that his life unfolds. Acting wisely, acting on the basis of knowledge, requires making wise choices based on one’s obligations and the import of one’s interactions.

Catharsis and working through

The classical notion  of catharsis combines several ideas, Rorty (1992: 14) explains. It is a medical term referring to a therapeutic cleansing or purgation. It is a religious term, referring to a purification achieved by the formal and ritualised, bounded expression of powerful and often dangerous emotions. It is a cognitive term, referring to an intellectual resolution or clarification that involves directing emotions to their appropriate intentional objects.

All three forms of catharsis are meant, at their best, to lead to the proper functioning of a well-balanced soul. In tragic drama, the psychological catharsis of the audience takes place through, and because of the catharsis of the dramatic action.

The Freudian psychotherapeutic expression working through is a lucid translation of many aspects of the classical notion of catharsis. In working through his emotions, a person realises the proper object of otherwise diffuse and sometimes misdirected passions. Like a therapeutic working through, catharsis occurs at the experienced sense of closure: emotional closure, completion or resolution, dramatic closure, narrative closure and pedagogic closure.

Pleasure and learning (learning as profound pleasure)

The pleasure of an action lies in its being fulfilled, i.e. completed as the kind of action that it is, with its associated values achieved. Tragic drama involves and conjoins so many different kinds of pleasure that it is difficult to determine which is primary and which accidental.

The pleasures that are specific to tragic drama are those that connect to the most profound of our pleasures, the pleasures of learning, with the therapeutic pleasures of catharsis, the pleasures arising from pity and fear through mimesis.
In recognising ourselves to be part of the activity of an ordered world, we take delight in self-knowledge, in the discovery that our lives form an ordered activity. When it is well structured and well performed, tragedy conjoins sensory, therapeutic and intellectual pleasure: pleasure upon pleasure, pleasure within pleasure, producing pleasure.

Drama and pedagogy 1: Pleasing and teaching: moral lessons and political significance

While tragedy pleases, it also teaches. Its lessons are moral, and its moral lessons have political significance. To choose and act wisely, we need to know the typical dynamic patterns of actions and interactions [to know oneself, who one is, is to know how to act, is to know the plot/script/curriculum and one’s role within it and one’s obligations within it]. For Aristotle, it is drama, of which tragedy is the highest form or genre, that ‘teaches’ moral and political truths, not history, the discipline which, for later moralists such as David Hume, was the source of such insights. In Aristotle’s day, historical texts were chronicles focused on particular events rather than on what can be generalised from them.

As well as teaching moral and political truths, tragic drama promotes a sense of shared civic life, in a similar fashion to well-formed rhetoric, and, like rhetoric, it does so emotionally and cognitively. Thus, tragic drama unites the audience, at least temporarily, in sharing the emotions of a powerful ritual performance; while it also conjoins the audience intellectually, bringing its members into one mind in a common world.

By presenting an audience with common models and a shared understanding of the patterns of action, tragedy, like philosophy and other modes of poetry, moves them beyond the individual or the domestic towards a larger, common, civic philia.

Drama and pedagogy 2: Tragic drama and chance

It has been said that, among its lessons, tragic drama teaches the power of chance and the force of contingency in determining whether the virtuous thrive. However, Rorty argues, while tragic drama does indeed focus on what can go wrong in the actions of the best of men [sic], its ethical lessons are not primarily about the place of accident and fortune or fortuitousness in the unfolding of human life.

For Aristotle, tragic drama is about what probably or inevitably happens. If, instead, the stressed lesson of tragic drama were the disconnection between intention and action, or between intention and outcome, it would produce sombre modesty and edifying resignation, traits which are not central to the Aristotelian scheme of virtues.

Tragic drama shows that what is central to excellence in action, what is intrinsic to the very nature of action, carries the possibility of a certain kind of arrogance and presumption. In acting purposively, people discount the tangential effects of chance and accident. Intelligent action sets aside what it cannot measure. Still, event of, in a general way, we sombrely recognise the contingency of our lives, this does not mean that people can avoid tragedy by becoming modest or resigned. It is in our nature to strive for what is best in us.

The lesson of tragic drama is not that we should know more, think more carefully. Nor is it that we should be more modest and less impetuously stubborn than the protagonists of tragic dramas. Because it is no accident that excellence sometimes undoes itself, one of the dark lessons of tragedy is that there are no lessons to be learnt in order to avert tragedy.

Drama and pedagogy 3: Transformations

Even so, for all that, the end note of tragic drama, its lesson, is not that of darkest despair. The major tragic figures emerge enlarged, transformed by what they have endured as well as by what they have learnt from their endurance, i.e. by the anagnorisis that is a double turning of their lives. Their fortunes are reversed in recognising who they are and what they have done. The mind becomes identical with what it thinks. Knowledge perfects the person. Thus, in the nobility with which they express their recognition, a nobility which fuses character with knowledge, tragic protagonists have become their best selves.

Tragic drama, for Aristotle, enacts the view that is philosophically expressed in the Nicomachean Ethics, whereby the virtuous can retain their nobility in the worst reversal of fortune, the loss of the goods that are normally central to eudaimonia, such as health, the thriving of their children and their city, wealth, the admiration of their fellows.

Tragic dramas portray the ethical doctrine that there is a sense, albeit not the ordinary sense, in which the constancy of virtue, the expression of nobility in the midst of great suffering can carry its own form of eudaimonia, despite the loss of goods that normally constitute happiness, as eudaimonia consists in the actions of a well-lived life, as perfected as it can be.

While the undeserved suffering of the virtuous elicit our pity and fear, the nobility with which they meet their reversals, a nobility manifest in their actions and their speech, illuminates us. In this way, the audience, like the tragic protagonist, are transformed by what they have seen and learnt by witnessing the dramatic stories of the tragic protagonists, participating in their final recognition.

Recognising what we are, recognising our kinship with those who over-reach themselves in action, we can become closer to fulfilling our natures and our virtues as knowers and as ‘citizens’, i.e. participants in a collectivity or collectivities of different scales, participants in various ‘worlds’ or various narrative, learning environments.

Rorty concludes: Since pleasure is the unimpeded exercise of a natural potentiality, our double self-realisation brings a double pleasure, all the more vivid because we are united, individually and communally, in realising that however apparently fragmented, ill-shaped and even terrible our lives may seem to us in the living, they form a single activity, a patterned, structured whole in the narrating, i.e. in the narrative, learning environment as pedagogic journey, from one ‘place’ to another through a passage of time and through a passage of space as in-between.
Until, that is, one learns to remain or to dwell in the in-between as the ‘now’ and the ‘null point’.

Notes

[1] Aristotle speaks primarily of agents or actors, prattontes, and of characters, ethe, not protagonists (Rorty, 1992: 19). Prattontes refers ambiguously to fictional characters, such as Odysseus, who appear in the Homeric epics and also in Philoctetes, on the one hand, and to the dramatis personae of a specific play. Ethe refers, firstly, to the dramatis personae of the drama, typified as the King, the Messenger, i.e. actants in a Greimasian sense, structural roles, and, secondly, to the specific character structures that affect their choices and actions, for example, as good, manly, consistent and so on.

Reference

Rorty, A. (1992). The Psychology of Aristotelian tragedy. In: Rorty, A., ed. Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1–22.

Telos and Teleology

RELATED TERMS: Narratology; Philosophy

“The study of design is linked, historically and conceptually, to teleology. Since Plato and Aristotle, the apparent orderliness of sensible objects has inspired reflection upon first principles. As William Paley suggested in his proof of God’s existence, whatever appears to have been designed – whether natural or artificial – provides an occasion to consider the purpose of things.”
(McCracken, 2000)

Telos and Design

“Design and teleology are two closely related notions; one may even say
that they are first cousins,” Ignacio Silva (2019: 61) notes. However, he continues, “one should not say that they are identical twins.”

The context for this relationship is that of Western (i.e. European) philosophy since the 18th century: “In the wake of Kant, Europe’s self-understanding had been framed by a profoundly teleo-messianic discourse of universal history: a movement of the history of “Man” from primitive and savage animality to rational and civilized humanity, with European humanity at the head.” (Glendinning, 2016: 278)

Telos and Narrative

Telos is a valuable but much misunderstood concept in the study and analysis of narrative, artistic practice and creativity, Victoria Alexander argues. Her insights can be extended to include design practice.

It is a mistake, Alexander continues, to assume that teleology implies an original, external cause, a prime mover or designer, that sets the whole machinery of the universe in motion. It is only when misunderstood in this way that final causality is said to be linear, consisting in direct cause and effect relationships, predictable, proportional and reductive, i.e. telos is understood in narrow functional terms.

For Alexander, telos, despite the variety of interpretations over time, has always involved the concept of chance. She argues that telos involves two distinct mechanisms, which she calls directionality (the maintenance of order) and originality (the discovery of new order).

Telic systems, Alexander contends, are formed according to mechanistic laws that arise spontaneously from disorder. In turn, law-abiding systems come to function in ways advantageous to them that are not predicted by those laws. These two aspects, emergent lawfulness and adaptability, make natural systems telic, which is to say progressive or creatively organised toward goals. In Alexander’s view only when activity involves both directionality and originality can it be called intentional, artistic or, indeed, designed.

References

Alexander, V.N. (2002). Narrative telos: the ordering tendencies of chance [Research paper]. City University of New York. Available from http://72.52.202.216/~fenderse/Narrative_Telos.htm [Accessed 4 October 2015].

Glendinning, S. (2016) Nietzsche’s Europe: An experimental anticipation of the future, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 47 (3), pp. 276–291. doi: 10.1080/00071773.2016.1180850.

McCracken, J. (2000) Review: [Discovering Design: Explorations in Design Studies by Richard Buchanan and Victor Margolin, and other works], Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 58 (1), pp. 76–79. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/432353 (Accessed: 19 September 2021).

Silva, I. (2019) From extrinsic design to intrinsic teleology, European Journal of Science and Theology, 15 (3), pp. 61–78.

Disciplinary Societies and Societies of Control

Environmental design outputs, such as narrative environments, could be said to form domains or territories with their own characteristic habits, rules, regulations and laws, a kind of ‘world’ or ‘universe’. In order to develop a sense of how such immersive enclosures might operate, how power is realised and distributed within them and how they, in turn, relate to their environments, i.e. the context of other narrative environments, it is worth considering the thoughts of Michel Foucault on disciplinary societies, Gilles Deleuze on societies of control and Byung-Chul Han’s on the ‘burnout society’.

Disciplinary societies, as defined by Foucault, are in the process of becoming societies of control, as defined by Deleuze, Chantal Mouffe (2012: 23) contends. This transition, which does not necessarily imply a complete replacement or displacement, is marked by the emergence of a new paradigm of power. In the disciplinary societies, command is exercised through the articulation of a network of apparatuses (dispositifs) that produce and regulate customs, habits and practices of production, the major disciplinary institutions being the family, school, factories, asylums and hospitals. In societies of control, however, command is immanent to the social field, distributed to the minds and bodies of the citizens.

The means of social integration and exclusion are no longer primarily realised primarily as enclosures that are spatialised, territorialised and exteriorised, as they used to be in disciplinary societies. In societies of control, integration and exclusion are now more often realised through perceptions that are interiorised and cognitive, woven into and guiding embodied inter-action. The environment is scoured for opportunities and affordances, for permissions and interdictions. This new paradigm of power Foucault calls ‘biopolitical’. Looking at this transition from the perspective of spatial practices, however, it might be seen as a re-articulation of enclosure and perception, with people ‘enclosing’ themselves through their own perceptual and behavioural habits in a terrain that appears more ‘open’, ‘public’ or ‘common’ but nevertheless remains ‘enclosed’.

As outlined by Deleuze (1992: 3), Foucault defined disciplinary societies as those which arose during the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe and reached their peak at the outset of the 20th century. Such societies inaugurate and develop the organization of vast spaces of enclosure, in which the individual passes sequentially from one closed environment to another, each having its own laws. The first (narrative) environment is that of the family. From there, the individual passes on to the school and after that, if a man at that time, to the barracks. The passage continues to the factory and, on occasion, the hospital, and possibly the prison, this last place being the pre-eminent instance of the enclosed (narrative) environment. For Foucault, the prison serves as the central analogical model.

The ideal project of these environmental enclosures, as analysed by Foucault, is particularly visible within the factory. It seeks to concentrate in place; to distribute in space; to order in time; and to compose a productive force within the dimension of space-time whose effect will be greater than the sum of its component forces. Foucault also recognised the transience of this model, as itself a successor to the societies of sovereignty. The goal and functions of societies of sovereignty were to tax rather than to organise production and to rule on death rather than to administer life. This prior transition took place over time, with Napoleon seeming to effect the large-scale conversion from one kind of society to the other. However, in their turn, the disciplines underwent a crisis to the benefit of new forces that were gradually instituted and which accelerated after World War II: a disciplinary society had ceased to be dominant.

In Foucault’s (1980: 58) words,

“From the eighteenth to the early twentieth century I think it was believed that the investment of the body by power had to be heavy, ponderous, meticulous and constant. Hence those formidable disciplinary regimes in the schools, hospitals, barracks, factories, cities, lodgings, families. And then, starting in the 1960s, it began to be realised that such a cumbersome form of power was no longer as indispensable as had been thought and that industrial societies could content themselves with a much looser form of power over the body.”

Deleuze (1992: 4) summarises the difference between enclosures and controls in the following terms: “Enclosures are molds, distinct castings, but controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other … “

Footnote

Mark Fisher (2012) argues that part of the reason why the work of Deleuze and Guattari continues to be relevant is that the question they raised, concerning the relation of desire to politics in a post-Fordist context, remains a crucial one. Deleuze and Guattari’s work specifically engages with the problem of how to construct an effective anti-authoritarian leftist movement, a goal which was promised but never actually delivered by the various cultural revolutions of the 1960s.

The lessening of the dominance of of the Fordist economy [Note 1], with its concomitant disciplinary structures means that, as Eric Alliez (2010) comments, we cannot, “just carry on with the same old forms of political institution, the same modes of working class social organisation, because they no longer correspond to the actual and contemporary form of capitalism and the rising subjectivities that accompany and/or contest it.”

There is little doubt that the language of ‘flows’ and ‘creativity’ used by Deleuze and Guattari has an exhausted quality because of its appropriation by capitalism’s creative industries, including design practices. Nevertheless, rather than seeing the proximity of some of Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts to the rhetoric of late capitalism as a mark of their failure, Fisher suggests they should be seen as a mark their success in gaining some purchase on the problems of political organisation under post-Fordist conditions.

The shift from Fordism to post-Fordism as the dominant political economic form, or in Foucault-Deleuze’s terms from disciplinary societies to societies of control, involves a change in the libidinal economy, notably an intensification of desire for consumer goods, funded by credit. These shifts cannot easily be combated by an assertion of working-class discipline because post-Fordism has seen the decomposition of the old working class. In the global North, the working class is no longer concentrated in manufacturing spaces. Its forms of industrial action, consequently, are no longer as effective as they once were. At the same time, the libidinal attractions of consumer capitalism needed to be met with an active counter-libido, not simply an anti-libidinal dampening.

This means that politics has to come to terms with the essentially inorganic nature of libido, as characterised by Freud, the Surrealists, Lacan, Althusser and Haraway, Deleuze and Guattari and others.

Inorganic libido is what Lacan and Land call the death drive: not a desire for death, for the extinction of desire in what Freud called the Nirvana principle, but an active force of death, defined by the tendency to deviate from any homeostatic regulation.

As desiring creatures, we ourselves are that which disrupts organic equilibrium. The novelty of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus account of history is the way that it combines an account of inorganic libido with the Hegelian-Marxist notion that history has a direction. One implication of this is that it is very difficult to put this historically machined inorganic libido back in its box: if desire is a historical-machinic force, its emergence alters ‘reality’ itself; to suppress it would therefore involve either a massive reversal of history, or collective amnesia on a grand scale, or both. [In other words, it would require the end of the world which, by all accounts, is easier to imagine than the end of capitalism]

Notes

1. Bob Jessop (1992) notes that the language of Fordism and post-Fordism has entered everyday discussion. In doing so, it has been vulgarised, reducing its utility for theoretical understanding and empirical analysis. Jessop distinguishes four levels in which Fordism and post-Fordism can be analysed: the labor process; the regime of accumulation; the mode of regulation; and the mode of societalisation. Jessop concludes that there is a fundamental analytical asymmetry between the two terms and advocates a more cautious and critical use of the notion of post-Fordism.

References

Deleuze, G. (1992). Postscript on the societies of control. October, 59 (1), 3–7. Available from http://www.jstor.org/stable/778828 [Accessed 21 March 2016].

Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1983) Anti-Oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Fisher, M. (2012) Post-capitalist desire, in Campagna, F. and Campiglio, E. (eds) What we are fighting for: A radical collective manifesto. London, UK: Pluto Press, pp. 131–138.

Foucault, M. (1980). Body/Power. In: Power/Knowledge: selected interviews and other writings 1972-1977, edited by C. Gordon. New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 55-62.

Han, B.-C. (2015) The Burnout society. Translated by E. Butler. Stanford, CA: Stanford Briefs.

Jessop, B. (1992) Fordism and post-fordism: A critical reformulation, in Scott, A. J. and Storper, M. (eds) Pathways to industrialization and regional development. London, UK: Routledge, pp. 42–62. doi: 10.4324/9780203995549.

Mouffe, C. (2012). Space, hegemony and radical critique. In: Featherstone, D., and Painter, J., eds. Spatial Politics: Essays for Doreen Massey. Chichester, West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 19–31.

Diegetic Levels

RELATED TERMS: Diegese;

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.

Détournement

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 Practice and Functionalism

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.”

References

Buchanan, R. (1998). Education and professional practice in design. Design Issues, 14 (2), 63–66. Available from http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/1511851.pdf?acceptTC=true [Accessed 14 January 2012].

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.

Design of Narrative Environments

Environing: Entrance; Beginning; Welcome; Boundary; Premise, Promise: Multiple Performativity

” ‘the environment’ is not a location; rather, it is ‘the everywhere’ — the inner and outer; the earth, the sky and the ocean; the home as the world given and the world of our own creation.” (Fry, 2012: 3)

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 historical, situated, 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 those worlds actively configure us as ‘being human’ or as non-being, excluded from the ‘worlding of the world’, in other words as ‘worldless’.

Design History

“Every age has its own distinctive building type. For the 19th century it was the railway station, for the 20th century it was the skyscraper. For the 21st century it looks like it’ll be the data centre.” (Heathcote, 2026)

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.

Dérive

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.

Computer Science

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.