RELATED TERMS: Actant; Happenings; Metalepsis; Methodology and Method; Paradigm; Performance Art;

“You are more than entitled to know what the word ‘performative’ means. It is a new word and an ugly word, and perhaps it does not mean anything very much. But at any rate there is one thing in its favour, it is not a profound word. I remember once when I had been talking on this subject that somebody afterwards said: ‘You know, I haven’t the least idea what he means, unless it could be that he simply means what he says’.”

Austin, J. L. (1970). Philosophical papers. 2nd ed.. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

“The last two decades or so have seen a small paradigm shift throughout the arts and humanities. Where, not so long ago, everything was regarded as ‘text’ or ‘discourse’, scholars are now more likely to talk about ‘performance’ and ‘the performative’ and ‘the body’ or ‘the bodily’. It is easy to be cynical about fashionable jargon, but, when cogently employed, the nomenclature does suggest, if not a revolution, then a significant shift in emphasis.”

Heile, B. (2006). Recent approaches to experimental music theatre and contemporary opera, Music & Letters, 87 (1), pp.72-81.

Gregson and Rose (2000) distinguish performance and performativity in the following way:

“…our argument is that performance – what individual subjects do, say, ‘act-out’ – and performativity – the citational practices which reproduce and/or subvert discourse and which enable and discipline subjects and their performances – are intrinsically connected, through the saturation of performers with power.”

From the perspective of design practices, Gregson and Rose (2000) indicate that their argument needs to be extended to space:

“Space too needs to be thought of as brought into being through performances and as a performative articulation of power.”

Finally, they emphasise the importance of recognising, “the complexity and uncertainty of performances and performed spaces”.

The relevance of the notions of performative and performativity, alongside that of performance, to the design of narrative environments is that narrative environments are performed or enacted. In being enacted, they constitute a field of actantiality or performativity in which different levels of narrative, different levels of existence and different modes of existence are intertwined, forming a tangled hierarchy in which specific diegetic or ontological metalepses (transgressions from one level of narrative to another or from a narrative modality of existence to a more everyday mode of existence) may be realised. In these ways, the interweaving of the material and the immaterial aspects of cultural practices can be explored as well as the inter-relationships between the actual (the ‘is’) and the potential (the ‘as if’).

Chris Salter (2010: xxi) writes that,

“Performance as practice, method, and worldview is becoming one of the major paradigms of the twenty-first century, not only in the arts but also the sciences. As euphoria for the simulated and the virtual that marked the end of the twentieth century subsides, suddenly everyone from new media artists to architects, physicists, ethnographers, archaeologists, and interaction designers are speaking of embodiment, situatedness, presence, and materiality. In short, everything has become performative.” 

Performative in design

In design practices, performative typically applies to the behaviour that is evoked in participants when they, through engagement with designs and/or design contexts, express themselves ‘unconsciously’, as part of a system or network of performativity or actantiality, rather than ‘consciously’ and deliberately, as ‘users’, which is more in the realm of scripted or improvised (unscripted), but framed, performance.

Performative in Philosophy

A performative utterance is one which does what it says. For example, if a person says “I promise to be there”, in normal circumstances this constitutes a promise to be at the specified place at the specified time, i.e. implies a course of action to fulfil the promise. The concept was originated by J. L. Austin, who contrasted performatives with constatives. Constatives make statements about the world which are either true or false. Performatives are neither true nor false (although whether the person making the promise turns up at the specified time and place will determine whether a promise was actually made or a deceit uttered).

The difficulties, and indeed the more interesting questions, arise when it is realised, as Austin did, that any utterance may be performative and that a clear and permanent distinction between performative and constative is hard to maintain. More depends on the circumstances of the utterance than the form of the utterance, although both have significance, e.g. barking out an order (Halt!) does much to constitute its status as ‘a command’ to act in a specified way.

Matters get even more interesting when the notion of “in normal circumstances” is opened to question (what are they?) and the question of whether the person uttering the performative fully intends to do what they say they will do, for example, whether they really intend to be there at the specified place at the specified time when they say “I promise to be there” (as noted above, concerning whether a promise was actually made, or some other act performed, such as a deception). The utterer may be lying, joking or may have forgotten a previous arrangement that they have made in which they promised to be somewhere else, i.e. intentionally or unintentionally invalidating the performative act. Alternatively, they may be uttering the sentence in the context of acting in a play.

In short, circumstances are the important factor, and their ‘normality’ should not simply be assumed but carefully considered.

The Performative: From the 1950s to the 21st Century

For a survey of the pathways along which the notion of the performative has travelled, see Jeffrey Nealon’s (2021) Fates of the Performative. Nealon traces it from J. L. Austin’s ordinary language philosophy of the 1950s, through its becoming
a linchpin for deconstruction in Derrida’s philosophy and associated American deconstructive literary theorists, to its value in thinking about resistant identities in the feminism and queer theory of the 1980s and 1990s, for example, in the work of Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. It subsequently became important as a concept in ethnic studies and its overlaps with performance studies, such as in the work of José Estaban Muñoz, Fred Moten and Diana Taylor. Furthermore, it became key to understanding the ‘agency’ or ‘actantiality’ not just subjects and identities but also of objects, for example, in Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory and Jane Bennett’s concept of vibrant matter. Eventually, Karen Barad applied it to matter itself. Thus, for Barad (2007: 152) in Meeting the Universe Halfway, “All bodies, not merely ‘human’ bodies, come to matter through the world’s iterative intra-activity — its performativity.” 

The illocutionary, the performative and collective assemblages of enunciation: Order words and social obligation

In A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari make the distinction between the performative, as that which one does by saying it, for example, I swear by saying “I swear”, and the illocutionary, as that which one does in speaking, for example, I ask a question by saying “Is…?”, I make a promise by saying “I promise” and I give a command by using the imperative, and so on. In this way, they make the performative sphere (doing by saying) part of a larger illocutionary sphere (what one does in saying). Thus, they argue,

“The performative itself is explained by the illocutionary, not the opposite. It is the illocutionary that constitutes the nondiscursive or implicit presuppositions. And the illocutionary is in turn explained by collective assemblages of enunciation, by juridical acts or equivalents of juridical acts, which, far from depending on subjectification proceedings or assignations of subjects in language, in fact determine their distribution… these “statements-acts” assemblages…in each language delimit the role and range of subjective morphemes.” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 78).

They call these illocutionary acts, these “statements-acts” assemblages, “order-words”. They continue,

“Order-words do not concern commands only, but every act that is linked to statements by a “social obligation”. Every statement displays this link, directly or indirectly. Questions, promises, are order-words. The only possible definition of language is the set of all order-words, implicit presuppositions, or speech acts current in a language at a given moment.” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 79)

For Deleuze and Guattari, the relation between the statement and the act is internal or immanent. It is not one of identity, however, but of redundancy. Given this,

“Language is neither informational nor communicational. It is…the transmission of order-words, either from one statement to another or within each statement, insofar as each statement accomplishes an act and the act is acomplished in the statement.” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 79)

In this way, the collective assemblage of enunciation is the redundant complex of the act and the statement that necessarily accomplishes it. These acts, in turn, are the set of all incorporeal transformations in a given society, and these incorporeal transformations are attributed to the bodies of that society.

Performance Theory – Schechter

The terms performance and performative are important for designs because, it is argued, they are performed by a participant. This performance takes on a different character depending on the design itself and may involve a combination of consumption by a consumer; reception by a reader, spectator or audience; or instrumental use by a user, as well as scripted or unscripted (improvisational) actions and decisions by the participant.

The performativity of ta design may also be discussed in terms of actantiality or actantiality-passantiality. In any case, through performance, the ‘as if’ is brought together with the ‘is’, to explore actual or potential transformations from one state of being to another. Systems of performative transformations, whatever their material aspects, Schechner (2004, xviii) notes, “also include incomplete, unbalanced transformations of time and space: doing a specific “there and then” in this particular “here and now” in such a way that all four dimensions are kept in play.”

Richard Schechner conceives of the topics which relate to the term performance as a fan or as a web, as follows:

 Source: Richard Schechner, Performance Theory

 Source: Richard Schechner, Performance Theory

References

Austin, J. L. (1970) Performative utterances, in Philosophical papers. 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Barad,K. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 

Gregson, N. and Rose, G. (2000) Taking Butler elsewhere: performativities, spatialities and subjectivities. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 18, pp. 433-452.

Nealon, J. T. (2021) Fates of the performative: From the linguistic turn to the new materialism. Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press.

Parker, A. and Sedgwick, E. K. (eds) (1995) Performativity and performance. New York, NY: Routledge.

Salter, C. (2010). Introduction. In: Entangled: technology and the transformation of performance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, xxi–xxxix.

Schechner, R. (2004) Performance theory. Rev & exp.ed. New York, NY: Routledge.

RELATED TERMS:

According to their website, Soft Agency is a group of female architects, artists, curators, scholars and writers from across the world who work with spatial practices. Their work is rooted in feminist methodological practices and formats, at the intersection of critical spatial practice, radical pedagogies, collectivities of becoming otherwise and alternative modes of participation. By creating spaces, workshops, events, exhibitions, publications and public programs, Soft Agency seeks to disrupt and re-imagine the lively entanglements through which civic life is organised. Through these means, they seek to rethink economic, political and social relationships.

The Agency was founded in Its members are Ana Filipovic, Fiona Shipwright, Gilly Karjevsky, Rosario Talevi, Valentina Karga and Teresa Dillon. 

Links

Soft Agency http://s-o-f-t.agency

RELATED TERMS:

A general organology is an account of life when it involves not just organic matter but organised inorganic matter.

As Stiegler (2020: 73) puts it, “General organology attempts to establish a theory of technical life, conceived here as a process whose evolution is indissolubly psycho-socio-techno-logical, in addition to being relatively bio-logical, which means that the general laws of biology are put under other auspices …, if not modified strictly speaking.”

Stiegler distinguishes the organic from the organological: the organological is composed of generally inorganic and yet organised matter, as with any technical object. Organology modifies the general laws of biology. However, this does not mean that it contradicts biology.Rather, it localises biological constraints.

General organology is a method that makes possible transdisciplinary approaches. Such approaches have become absolutely essential in the current stage of organological development, that is, of technical development, which modifies both psychosomatic and social organizations. However, it does so today in an accelerated fashion. This raises completely new questions which induce an epistemological or even an ‘anthropological’ break. Stiegler prefers to refer to neganthropology rather than to an anthropological break. These questions also encounter irreducible critical problems that fall under what Stiegler calls ‘pharmacology’.

References

Stiegler, B. (2020) ‘Elements for a general organology’, Derrida Today, 13(1), pp. 72–94. doi: 10.3366/DRT.2020.0220

USE for: Defamiliarization; Ostranenie; Making Strange

RELATED TERMS: Avant-garde movements; Modernism; Psychogeography; Situationist International; Alienation effect (Verfremdungseffekt); Epic theatre – Brecht; Xu Zhen Supermarket; Dissensus – Ranciere; Genre – and Story (fabula) and Plot (sjuzet); Story (fabula) and Plot (sjuzet or sjuzhet); Realism

Defamiliarisation, Ostranenie or making strange is a literary device that was brought to attention by Victor Shklovsky (1991), a Russian Formalist, in an essay first published in 1917 entitled “Art as Device”, sometimes translated as “Art as Technique”. Formalism was a school of literary theory and analysis that emerged in Russia around 1915, devoting itself to the study of literariness, i.e. the sum of ‘devices’ that distinguish literary language from ordinary language.

The purpose of defamiliarisation is to put the mind in a state of radical unpreparedness; to cultivate the willing suspension of disbelief. We see and hear things as if for the first time. The conventionality of our perceptions is put into question. By ‘making strange’, ostranenie, we force the mind to rethink its situation in the world, to see the world afresh, and this requires an expenditure of effort (Wall, 2009: 20). A similar idea can be found in some English Romantic poets.

All vivid writing and art is to some degree defamiliarising. It could be argued, as does Wall (2009), that figures of speech aim to defamiliarize; to render the familiar unfamiliar in order to break with conventional perceptions. If those figures fail it is likely because they are either inept or clichéd. A cliché is a figure of speech which has had its time and become familiar, losing its power to defamiliarise.

Constantin Brancusi said that modernism in the arts had become a necessity because the techniques of realism were had become all too familiar.

In the period of Czech Formalism, Jan Mukarovsky further refined this notion of defamiliarisation in terms of foregrounding. A distinct Russian group is the ‘Bakhtin school’ comprising Mikhail Bakhtin, Pavlev Medvedev, and Valentin Voloshinov, theorists who combined elements of Formalism and Marxism in their accounts of verbal multi-accentuality and of the dialogic text.

If taken together, the Russian avant-garde and Russian Formalism might be seen to offer a coherent argument for linking modernist formalism with avant-garde social action. Thus, Shklovsky’s defamiliarisation or ostranenie suggests that formal innovations might have the consequence of revealing “false consciousness”. In this is the case, this conception of defamiliarisation closely resembles Bertolt Brecht’s concept of Verfremdungseffekt, or ‘alienation effect’.

In their studies of narrative, the Russian Formalists also clarified the distinction between plot (sjuzet) and story (fabula).

Sources

Behler, C. (2001). CB’s glossary for students. Available from http://faculty.washington.edu/cbehler/glossary/glossary.html#defamiliarization [Accessed 6 March 2016]

Shklovsky, V. (1991). Art as device. In: Theory of Prose. Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1–14.

Wall, A. (2009). A note on defamiliarization. In: Myth, metaphor and science. Chester, UK: Chester Academic Press, 20–22.

RELATED TERMS: Modernity and Coloniality

Decolonisation is the historical struggle for national sovereignty against colonialism. In recent history, the term is most often applied to the decolonisations that took place in the period after World War II, when European countries generally lacked the wealth and political support necessary to suppress faraway revolts in their colonies. Furthermore, they faced opposition from the newly emergent international powers, the USA and the USSR, both of whom were opposed to European colonialism.

Decoloniality, on the other hand, is an epistemological category that takes colonialism as constitutive of modernity. Decoloniality seeks to dismantle the colonialist ‘distribution of the sensible’ (Ranciere, 2004), the frameworks of thinking and sensing, while delinking from the habitus of colonialism, its forms of life and its characteristic forms of subjectification and objectification. Analytically, decoloniality seeks to reconstruct histories excluded from the universalist frameworks of modernity and restore them to those from whom they were taken. As a programme, decoloniality seeks to establish a pluriversal or polyversal epistemology.

Online resources

The Decolonising Design Group of Bloomsbury Publishing has produced a lesson plan that examines how design practitioners and theorists can make sense of the concepts of decolonisation and decoloniality in the context of our own situated practices. It is available here: https://www.bloomsburydesignlibrary.com/article?docid=b-9781350097964&tocid=b-9781350097964-003

References

ISLAA (2021). Decoloniality and the Politics of History, Columbia University, April 29–May 28, 2021 [Online event]. Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA). Available at https://www.islaa.org/decoloniality-2021 [Accessed 22 April 2021]

Ranciere, J. (2004). The Politics of aesthetics: the distribution of the sensible. London, UK: Continuum.

Reiter, B. (ed.) (2018) Constructing the pluriverse: the geopolitics of knowledge. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

RELATED TERMS: Realism; World, World of the Story and World of the Narrative Environment

An interesting question for the narrative environment designer is: to what extent was the Dau project, enacted in 2009-2011, and reiterated in 2019, a narrative environment? It also raises, obliquely, the question of the boundaries between (voluntary) ‘participation’ and (involuntary) ‘subjection’ particularly, as in this case, in a fictional reconstruction of an oppressive regime where the participants enact the subjection in a recursive cycle.

The Dau project brought into existence a fictional world that sought, as an experimental art piece, to blur the distinctions between art and life. The project was initially conceived by the Russian film director Ilya Khrzhanovsky in Moscow in 2005 as a film about the Soviet physicist Lev Landau. The project title, Dau, is an abbreviation of Landau’s surname. However, what was initially conceived as a biographical portrait of a physicist transformed into a ‘staged reality experience’ when Khrzhanovsky decided that Landau’s life story was too large and potent to be confined to a conventional narrative.

In 2009, Khrzhanovsky built a huge sealed set in the northeastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, where Landau worked and taught in the 1930s. The film’s set, which became a cult of historical verisimilitude, was known locally as ‘the Institute’. It was built in Kharkiv’s derelict outdoor swimming pool complex, which offered a natural courtyard surrounded by low Stalin-era buildings.

In the process, the constructed environment became less a film set than a parallel world. It functioned as a mini-state, trapped in the period 1938-1968, sealed off from the contemporary world outside it. This world was populated with hundreds participants, some actors, some non-actors, some celebrities, some scientists, who lived as faithfully as possible as Soviet citizens of the time. The obsessive drive for period authenticity went into such details as clothes, hairstyles, food packaging, cigarette brands, and so on. As well was having a spatial existence, time also moved forwards inside Dau’s world. As it passed from 1938 to 1968, the period detail was continually updated (Rose, 2019).

James Meek (2015) summarises concisely the events of this ‘staged reality’, “For more than two years, between 2009 and 2011, hundreds of volunteers, few of them professional actors, were filmed living, sleeping, eating, gossiping, working, loving, betraying each other and being punished in character, in costume, with nothing by way of a script, on the Kharkiv set, their clothes and possessions altered, fake decade by fake decade, to represent the privileged, cloistered life of the Soviet scientific elite between 1938 and 1968.”

The strangest aspect of this project was that only a tiny proportion of this daily living was actually filmed. It was not like a giant Big Brother house. There were no hidden cameras. A single cinematographer, Jürgen Jürges, roamed the set with a three-person crew. Between 2009 and 2011, he filmed 700 hours of footage, a very small amount, considering the two-year duration of the “experiment”. The rest of the time, people went about their Soviet business, unobserved.

Some of the nature of Dau’s realism or verisimilitude can be gleaned from the casting. Dau’s man-child son is played by Nikolay Voronov, who turns out to be a Ukrainian YouTube star. Sasha and Valera, two gay lovers in the Dau world, were formerly homeless people. The mother of Nora, Landau’s wife, is played by Lidiya who is the real-life mother of the Russian actor, Radmila Shchyogoleva, who plays Nora.

As expressed by, Teodor Currentzis, one of the points of participating in this experiment is how to be yourself and yet not to be yourself at the same time. You are in an environment that you know is a game, but it does not work if you are not also yourself. Indeed, so successful was this ‘immersion’, this double articulation of one’s game-participant self and one’s ‘real self, that when leaving the world of Dau and re-entering the outside world, the participants felt it was like visiting another time. The real world became like a stage or film set to them.

The Dau experiment in Kharkiv ended definitively in November 2011, when Khrzhanovsky ordered the destruction of the Institute. According to a report in Kommersant, the director hired a group of real-life Russian neo-Nazis to storm the set, destroy it and performatively enact a massacre of its staff.

From the seven hundred hours of footage shot in Kharkiv of the myriad threads of an ultra-elaborate artistic experiment, editors in London were said to be fashioning a dozen or more movies, a television series, and a user-directed internet narrative system. Finally, in October 2018, the film, DAU Freiheit, or DAU Freedom, is to be shown to the public for the first time at an art installation in Berlin.

However, it may be that , as James Meek concludes, “the significance of a representative spectacle was, perhaps, most fully realised in the emotions of those who enacted it, rather than those who will merely witness its two-dimensional, unscented, intangible afterglow on a flat screen”, which raises the issue of the different kinds of ‘immersion’ that are possible for narrative environments, immersion in a cinema diegese and narrative being different from that of theatre and theatre being different from that of a ‘staged reality experience’.

To rekindle that degree of significance for the visitor to the installation, Mark Brown reports that a large section of the Berlin Wall will be rebuilt on Unter den Linden boulevard, creating a walled-in city within a city. Before entering this city, visitors will have to buy ‘visas’ online and hand over their phones. The project will end with a ritualistic tearing down of the wall on 9 November 2018, exactly 29 years after the event in 1989.

A report on the project by Alina Simone can be heard here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWwf_uvcsCk

A review of the Parisian version of the Dau project, which opens in early 2019, can be seen below from the programme Encore

References

Brown, M. (2018). Stalinist Truman Show: artist paid 400 people to live as Soviet citizens. Guardian, 1 September. Available from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/31/stalinist-truman-show-artist-paid-400-people-to-live-as-soviet-citizens [Accessed 2 September 2018].

Meek, J. (2015). Diary. London Review of Books, 37 (19), 42-43. Available from https://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n19/james-meek/diary [Accessed 2 September 2018].

Rose, S. (2019). Inside Dau, the ‘Stalinist Truman Show’: ‘I had absolute freedom – until the KGB grabbed me’. Guardian, 26 January. Available from https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/jan/26/inside-the-stalinist-truman-show-dau-i-had-absolute-freedom-until-the-kgb-grabbed-me [Accessed 27 January 2019].

RELATED TERMS: Design, Entwurf, Entwerfen; Storyworld; Everyday; Present-at-hand (Vorhanden) and Ready-to-hand (Zuhanden); Lifeworld – Lebenswelt – Umwelt; Modernism; Philosophy; Sloterdijk; Heidegger; Nietzsche

“There is a Dasein whose thrownness consists precisely in the overcoming of its thrownness.”

Herbert Marcuse (2005, 1928: 32).

As one particular understanding or interpretation of ‘lifeworld’ or ‘being-in-the-world’ or, indeed, the everyday, the notion of Dasein may be of particular interest in the design and understanding of narrative environments. It may also be of use in seeking to grasp the character of human action, whether understood in the form of will, agency, performativity or actantiality, in the context of an articulated narrative world (diegesis, storyworld) and lifeworld (e.g. actant-network ontology or actant-rhizome ontology).

Dasein is a German word that translates literally as ‘there [da] being [Sein]’ or ‘being there’. While Dasein’s root meaning is usually rendered in English as ‘Being there’, it is equally valid to translate it as ‘Being-here’. Dasein means inhabiting and existing as a Here, a site within which Being and beings can meaningfully appear (Fried and Polt, 2014: xi).

In everyday German, the word Dasein is used just as the word ‘existence’ is used in English. However, Heidegger viewed the Latin term existentia as misleading and superficial. In Being and Time (1927) Heidegger, gives the term a specific philosophical significance. Prior to Heidegger, Dasein commonly referred to the being of persons. Heidegger follows and intensifies the common usage.

Dasein is defined in Being and Time as that being for whom Being itself is at issue, for whom Being, especially its own Being, is in question. For the most part, for Heidegger, this being is the human being although, as Fried and Polt (2014: xi) note, Dasein not simply equivalent to humans. It may help to think of Dasein, Fried and Polt suggest, as a condition into which human beings enter, either individually or collectively, at a historical juncture when the Being of beings becomes an issue for them, or Being as the event of meaningful disclosure takes place for them.

As distinct from the mode of being of a present-at-hand entity (object or artefact) or a ready-to-hand entity (tool or instrument), Dasein is by existing as a self-related being, for whom its own Being, as an individuality through a collectivity, is at issue as it goes about inhabiting the world. Each of us interacts with artefacts, instruments and other human beings in terms of some possible ways for us to be, such as being a doctor, being a teacher, being a parent or being a craftsperson.

Usually, we do not choose our identity, but behave in the way ‘one’ does in the community to which one belongs. In short, one conforms to (or struggles with) the norm. However, experiences such as anxiety and the call of conscience can shock or provoke one into choosing who one is, in the face of one’s own mortality. One then exists ‘authentically’, at least for a time.

An authentic individual, in this account, lives in a way that is appropriate to a temporal being, a being who has always already been thrown into some situation, who projects possibilities, and who dwells among other beings in a present world. Our temporality is historical, as each of us is a member of a community with a shared inheritance. Through communicating and struggling (agonism), a people or community may find a way to forge a future from its past (Fried and Polt, 2014: xii).

Mitcham (2001: 28) explains Dasein in the following terms,

“Heidegger undertakes an extended phenomenological analysis of human experience, concluding that Dasein is being-in-the-world characterized existentially as care, concern, solicitude – both about its own being and about the being of the world. That is, underlying all of Dasein’s modes of being and fundamental to it is the experience of care or worry, uncertainty.”

While this general orientation to Dasein may be accepted, in which matters of fact are understood simultaneously as matters of concern, to adopt a Latourian (2004) expression, difficulties arise in the interpretation of what Heidegger means by saying that Dasein is a question of ‘being-thrown’.

Thus, Mitcham (2001: 29), for example, argues that when Heidegger hyphenates the German word Da-sein, he does so in order to emphasise the specificity, as this-ness or there-ness, of the human as that which finds itself thrown into a particular body, dwelling in this country, now at this specific historical period, as well as the care or concern that arises in the specific human being about so finding itself.

Basing himself on the assumption that this is what Heidegger suggests that the term Da-sein implies, Mitcham contends that only from such ineluctable particularity may one be truly human, may one think authentically. It is this sense of grounded being or being-in-the-world, in an individual body, in a unique place, and with an exclusive history, that Mitcham emphasises by adopting the term.

Peter Sloterdijk attempts a similar specification of the notion of Dasein when he argues that ‘being thrown into the world’, is to be thrown into an envelope of some kind, To define humans is to define the envelopes, the life support systems, that make it possible for them to breathe, to live.

Such interpretations, however, assume that the condition of ‘being thrown’ implies a sense of ‘being thrown into the world’, rather than a more prolonged contingency, i.e. simply that of being in a condition of thrownness, without cessation, without origin, without arrival, without destination, without telos, or without ground, so to speak.

This may lead to a further interpretation of the sense of anxiety of which Heidegger speaks, in that the human subject may recognise both its groundedness, in a specific body, in a specific place with a specific history, and its groundlessness, as an unending passage of being-as-thrownness. Expressing the matter in this way opens it to a potential relationship with some postmodernist writings, i.e. post-high-modernist or post-1945 writings. For example, Samuel Beckett and other authors of the literature of the absurd, undertook to subvert the foundations of accepted modes of thought and experience so as to reveal the meaninglessness of existence and the underlying “abyss,” or “void,” or “nothingness” on which any supposed security is conceived to be precariously suspended (Abrams, 1999: 168-169).

In Nietzsche’s (2010) terms, “My humanity is a constant self-overcoming.” In other words, as Golding (2014: 218) glosses, “This, and nothing less, are the here/now groundless grounds of one’s humanity; a used, slightly soiled present-tense ‘is’…”.

This Nietzschean ‘self-overcoming’ is being interpreted here as a self-overthrowing, a constant ‘designing’ and ‘re-designing’, developed through a particular understanding of the Heideggerian structural movement of thrown-ahead-and-returning in terms of existential thrown-openness (“thrown projectedness”: geworfener Entwurf). In terms of design practices, such a characterisation of the human condition resonates with Manzini (2015) who considers that, in the 21st century, we are living in “a world in which everybody constantly has to design and redesign their existence”.

Although Heidegger would not use this terminology, the ground-less groundedness of Dasein lies in its inter-subjectivity and inter-corporeality. Thus, as Dalmayr (1989: 393) writes, the “worldliness” of Dasein entails inter-human linkage, an aspect discussed in Being and Time under the heading of “co-being”, of “being-with”, or Mitsein. Heidegger repeatedly insists in Being and Time that the ontological construal of being-in-the-world implies that the world is, “always a world already shared with others: the world of Dasein is a co-world; being-in signifies a co-being with others.” (Dallmayr, 1989: 394)

References

Abrams, M.H. (1999). A Glossary of Literary Terms, 7th ed. Boston, MA: Heinle & Heinle.

Dallmayr, F. (1989). The discourse of modernity: Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger (and Habermas). Praxis International, 8 (4), 377–406.

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USE for: Taoism

RELATED TERMS:

The notion of dao (tao), in as far as it indicates a path, a way or a set of principles, may have importance for considering the kind of pathway or passage that occurs in a narrative environment. Also, reference to the dao is important in highlighting that a narrative environment is always, to some extent, a learning environment, because, as the Xueji (On Teaching and Learning) asserts, “A person will never come to understand the Dao without learning”. Similarly, engagement with or participation in a narrative environment involves learning.

As Di (2016: 45) explains, the character dao literally means the road one travels, but it also signifies the journey one takes in life. Furthermore, dao signifies a holistic conception of humans and nature, a humanistic worldview that forms the basis of ancient Chinese thought. The term dao (tao) is very widely used in ancient Chinese philosophical texts. From its literal meaning of ‘way’ or ‘path’, it is a short step to its use to mean ‘way of doing something’ and hence to mean ‘principle’ or ‘set of principles’. (Wilkinson, 1997: viii)

It is in the sense of ‘set of principles’ that it is used in the Analects of Confucius. To follow the dao in Confucian terms is to follow the set of moral principles expounded in that text (Wilkinson, 1997: viii). For Confucius, the essence of education is to study, pursue and live the dao, and to teach and learn holistically (Di, 2016: 45).

In order to effect a translation of the principles of the dao into human daily learning, experience and existence, Xueji, like many Chinese classic writings, advocates the cultivation of character and moral development (Di, 2016: 47).

While, in Daoism, the term ‘Dao’ is used to mean way, path and set of principles, it also has another sense. The fundamental assertion of Daoist philosophy is that there is an ultimate reality, and this is referred to as the Dao, as something formless yet complete, something that is real, ultimate and in some way the basis of all there is.

Dao in narrative environments, while it exploits the senses of path and set of principles and implies learning, does not necessarily imply a belief in an ultimate ground or an ultimate reality; unless that ultimate ground is understood not as a prior grounding but as a simultaneous modality of ‘chaos’ and/or ‘spontaneity’.

References

Di, X. (2016). The Teaching and learning principles of Xueji in the educational practice of the world today. In: Chinese philosophy on teaching and learning: Xueji in the twenty-first century. New York, NY: State University of New York Press, 39–59.

Wilkinson, R. (1997). Introduction. In: Tao te ching by Lao Tzu, translated by Arthur Waley. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics of World Literature, vii–xix.

RELATED TERMS: Feminism and Materialism; Historical Materialism – Marxism; Methodology and Method; Modernity and Coloniality; Postmodernism

For narrative environment design, cultural studies is an important area of research because, like narrative environments, it is inherently interdisciplinary, or perhaps transdisciplinary, and because of its emphasis upon social practices, including spatial practices. There is therefore a lot to learn both from its subject matter, for example, the topics of power, ethnicity and gender, but also the ways in which it seeks to weave together different traditions of thought to come up with novel insights into social practice.

Cultural studies is the engaged, self-conscious study of cultures. While cultural studies has drawn upon the ideas of Marxism, feminism, poststructuralism and postmodernism, its discipline base has shifted from literary studies to sociology and ethnography. In addition, its intellectual agenda has also shifted from an interest in popular culture and (mass) media cultural forms to questions of ideology, power, gender and ethnicity. In recent times, its focus has extended to include questions of representation and the formation of cultural identities (Brooker, 2003: viii).

Abrams (1999: 53) notes that one of the chief precursors of modern cultural studies was Roland Barthes. In his book, Mythologies, Barthes analysed the social conventions and codes that confer meanings in a wide range of social practices and topics , such as ornamental cookery, striptease, the poor and the proletariat. Another precursor was the British school of neo-Marxist studies of literature and art, especially in their popular and working-class modes, as an integral part of the general culture. Among the early texts in this movement were Raymond Williams’ Culture and Society (1958) and Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (1958). This strand of thinking became institutionalised in the influential Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), founded by Hoggart in 1964 (Abrams,1999: 53)

The establishment of the CCCS in Birmingham in 1964 may mark an historic turning point in the foundation of the field. However, as Stuart Hall stressed, cultural studies was actually initiated elsewhere, in earlier political movements, for example, the New Left, and in subject areas such as English studies, history and sociology. Thus, while the CCCS constitutes one kind of institutional origin, its original curriculum consisted in a diverse range of writings first published a decade earlier (Procter, 2004: 37).

In the United States, the vogue for cultural studies had its roots mainly in the mode of literary and cultural criticism known as new historicism, with its antecedents both in poststructural theorists such as Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault and in the treatment of culture as a set of signifying systems by Clifford Geertz and other cultural anthropologists.

References

Abrams, M.H. (1999). A Glossary of Literary Terms, 7th ed. Boston, MA: Heinle & Heinle.

Brooker, P. (2003). A Glossary of Cultural Theory, 2nd ed. London, UK: Arnold.

Procter, J. (2004). Stuart Hall. London, UK: Routledge.