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.

Fried, G. and Polt, R. (2014). Translators’ introduction to the second edition. In: Introduction to metaphysics, 2nd ed., by Martin Heidegger_._ New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Golding, J. (2014) Ecce Homo Sexual: Ontology and Eros in the Age of Incompleteness and Entanglement, Parallax, 20 (3), pp. 217–230. doi: 10.1080/13534645.2014.927628.

Latour, B. (2004). Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern. Critical Inquiry, 30 (2), 225–248.

Manzini, E. (2015) Design, when everybody designs: An introduction to design for social innovation. Translated by R. Coad. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Marcuse, H. (2005, 1928) Contributions to a phenomenology of historical materialism, in Wolin, R. and Abromeit, J. (eds) Heideggerian Marxism. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, pp. 1–33.

Mitcham, C. (2001). Dasein versus design: the problematics of turning making into thinking. International Journal of Technology and Design Education, 11 (1), 27–36. Available from http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1011282121513 [Accessed 20 August 2014]

Nietzsche, F (2010). Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufman New York: Vintage Books, Section 4, p.218 and Section 8, p.223

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.

USE for: Human geography, Social geography

RELATED TERMS: Geography; Scape metaphors; Anthropo-Scenes

Those parts of the discipline of geography which are of most value to narrative environment design and analysis are cultural geography, human geography or social geography.

According to Merle Patchett (2010), three eras of cultural geography can be identified: the traditional; the new; and the more-than-representational.

Traditional cultural geography is primarily an American field of scholarship, linked closely to the mid-20c work of Carl Sauer. He took the landscape as the defining unit of geographic study. For Sauer, while cultures and societies both developed out of their landscape, they also shaped their landscape. It is this interaction between the ‘natural’ or ‘physical’ landscape and human communities which creates the ‘cultural landscape’. Cultural geographers following this tradition focused on studying the range of human interventions in transforming the ‘natural’ or ‘physical’ landscape. They were most interested in quantifying material culture, such as buildings and architectures, agricultural technologies and other industries.

The 1960s and 1970s saw a quantitative revolution in geography and interest in cultural geography declined as human geographers turned their attention to developing the discipline as a spatial science. However, during the 1980s, the critique of positivism in geography instigated a renewed interest in cultural geography in North America and particularly in the UK.

This ‘new’ cultural geography had different theoretical assumptions, methods and subjects than those of traditional cultural geography. Rather than focusing on material culture, mostly of non-modern and rural societies, the ‘new’ cultural geographers of the 1980s and 1990s examined culture in contemporary and urban societies, and focused primarily on investigating non-material culture, such as, for example, identity, ideology, power, meaning and values. Among the main themes that were incorporated into ‘new’ cultural geography were colonialism and post-colonialism; postmodernism; popular culture and consumption; gender and sexuality; ‘race’, anti- racism and ethnicity; ideology; language; and media. ‘New’ cultural geographers also drew on a diverse set of theoretical traditions, including Marxism, feminism, post-colonial theory, post-structuralism and psychoanalysis.

In turn, this ‘new’ cultural geography, with its emphasis on identity, is challenged by non-representational theory, as formulated by Nigel Thrift. Instead of studying and representing social relationships, non-representational theory focuses upon practices, i.e. how human and nonhuman formations are enacted or performed, not simply on what is produced. This is a post-structuralist theory drawing in part from the works of Michel Foucault, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and phenomenonologists such as Martin Heidegger. However, it also weaves into its rich tapestry the perspectives of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Bruno Latour and Michel Serres. Non-representational theory’s focus upon hybrid formations parallels the conception of ‘hybrid geographies’ developed by Sarah Whatmore, where she prompted cultural geographers to attend to the ‘more-than-human’ geographies in which we live.

It is perhaps this last approach, with its emphasis on hybrid formations, that is of most interest from a narrative environment perspective, although not in the form of abstract accounts of body-practices and phenomenological accounts of ‘being-in-the-world’ but rather in the form of an approach which enables exploration of the interactions between representations, discourses, material entities, spaces and practices, considered as actants and moments of actantiality.

As Patchett notes, given the diversity of approaches available, cultural geography is perhaps best characterised as a living tradition of disagreements, passions, commitments and enthusiasms.

At a general level, Anderson (2009) contends that cultural geography seeks to explore the intersections of context and culture, exploring how cultural activities and contexts interact, influence and perhaps even become synonymous with one another. The product of the intersection between context and culture is identified as place, constituted by imbroglios of traces, i.e. marks, residues or remnants left in place by cultural life. Traces are most commonly considered as material in nature, including buildings, signs, statues, graffiti, in the form of discernible marks on physical surroundings. Nevertheless, they can also be non-material, including, for example, activities, events, performances or emotions.

Traces tie cultures and geographies together, influencing the identity of both. As a consequence of the constant production of traces, places are dynamic entities in fluid states of transition, as new traces react with existing or older ones to change the meaning and identity of the location.

Cultural geography, by interrogating these traces, their interactions, and repercussions, critically appraises the cultural ideas and preferences motivating them, and the reasons for their significance, popularity and effect. Cultural geographers, therefore, Anderson argues, analyse and interrogate all the agents, activities, ideas and contexts that combine together to leave traces in places.

Again, this resonates with how a narrative environment might be understood.

References

Anderson, J. (2009). Understanding cultural geography: places and traces. London, UK: Routledge.

Patchett, M. (2010). What is cultural geography? Experimental Geography in Practice. Available from https://merlepatchett.wordpress.com/2010/09/03/cultural-geography/ [Accessed 2 September 2016].

RELATED TERMS: Avant-garde movements; Feminism – Material feminism

While themes derived from avant-garde art practice may be of relevance to design practices, of potentially more interest may be those practices of the feminist avant-garde. In confronting an oppressive and conformist patriarchal system prevalent in the in the immediate post-World War Two years, feminist artists developed work that challenged the cult of masculine artistic genius while reclaiming lost ground in the public sphere. They used the media of photography, film, video, and action/performance to explore the female body as a work of art that challenged the ascendancy of the male gaze.

They examined the personal as the political by undermining stereotypical roles as housewife, mother and wife, symbolically enacting the act of breaking free from oppressive confinement while re-articulating the iconography of female eroticism and sexuality, in the process critiquing the reification of the female body while engaging in role play. Through these experimental performances, feminist women artists analysed the dynamics of the perceiving/perceived gendered body considering how, as Schor (2015: 61) argues, women experience a split consciousness: as they internalise the male gaze, they simultaneously perceive themselves as subjects and as objects. A significant part of this perceptual domain involves the critique of the ideal of (feminine) beauty and its dictates as well as highlighting the violence inflicted on women.

Gabriele Schor (2015) argues that the historiography of modern art, in adhering too faithfully to the discursive paradigm of male artistic genius, does a serious disservice to the contribution made by women artists. Women artists played a significant part in the classical avant-gardes, whose protagonists sought to break free from tradition and win social acceptance for a new art. These avant-gardes produced their manifestos, pamphlets and art works during the first third of the 20th century, before and after the First World War, until they were suppressed by fascist and Stalinist forces in Europe.

Peter Burger (1974) adjudged that the avant-garde had failed, a contention that is disputed by Karin Hirdina. Hirdina thinks that the demise of the avant-garde was not a simple endogenous failure but owed more to the fact of their being suppressed. Nevertheless, those representatives of the historic avant-garde who survived exile and oppression could not simply pick up where they left off in the 1920s.

The sense of the term avant-garde changed after World War Two, a period in which it came to cover such art practices as action painting, abstract expressionism, minimalism, op art, pop art, Situationism, Fluxus, Happenings and conceptual art. One of the most striking tendencies in art at this time was the feminist art movement. However, such feminist art is generally not identified as being part of the neo-avant-garde.

This inability to perceive the proximity of ‘feminism’ and ‘avant-garde’ is a weakness of both art history and art criticism. Schor (2015) clearly delineates the feminist art movement’s historic and pioneering achievements, focusing on the art produced during the 1970s. The activities of these women artists manifest all the characteristics of the avant-garde, a concept too closely connected with male artists.

References

Burger, P. (1984). Theory of the avant-garde, translated by Michael Shaw. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Schor, G. et al. (2015). Feminist avant-garde: art of the 1970s, the Sammlung Verbund Collection, Vienna. München: Prestel

Video resources

Rebel Women: The Great Art Fight Back, 22:30 18/06/2018, BBC4, 60 mins. Available from https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/ondemand/index.php/prog/1172DA83?bcast=126923343 [Accessed 10 Mar 2019]