dthe development of an intellectually viable and well-grounded scholarly approach to design as practice, as discipline and as pedagogy
RELATED TERMS: Objects and Events;
A design ‘is’ what it ‘does’. Although constituted by materiality in the form of ‘objects’ and ‘things’, a design ‘takes place’ as an ‘event’ in a situation. It ‘happens’, in a particular place, at a particular time for particular people.
One could argue, and it is only an argument, that such an event ‘has’ meaning, with meaning interpreted along the lines of action and actantiality.
RELATED TERMS: Agonism and Avant-Gardism; Aleatory; Alienation Effect (Verfremdungseffekt); Critical Theory; Defamiliarisation; Design of Narrative Environments; Dissensus – Ranciere; Distribution of the Sensible – Ranciere; Epic Theatre – Brecht; Feminist Avant-Garde Art Practices; Happenings; Methodology and Method; Modernism; Modernism and Avant-Garde Art Practices; Modernity; Ontological Metalepsis; Research Methodologies; Sabi and Wabi-Sabi; Situationist International; Theatre of Cruelty – Artaud; Theoretical Practice; Utopia and Utopian Thinking;
Since designed environments are concerned with the relationship(s) between cultural (narrative) phenomena in various media and embodied, enacted phenomena in various material environments or -spheres, the work of the European avant-garde movements, with their concern for the relationships among art practices, aesthetic practices and political practices is of great interest and relevance, from technical, methodological and purposive perspectives. Avant-garde practices can be linked to the discussion of ontological metalepsis.
The figurative use of the word avant-garde to denote radically progressive leaders of both art and society can be traced to the French utopian socialist Henri de Saint-Simon, I760-I825, Donald Egbert (1967: 340) states.
Saint-Simon’s conception of artists’ dual role leads to a persistent dilemma for radically avant-garde artists. As members of an elite social avant-garde, they may be expected to make art that directly promotes radical social ideas, in accordance with the later doctrines of Saint-Simon, and still later those of Marxists and Marxist-Leninists. Such art, this doctrine maintains, should be socially realistic, so as to be more readily understood by the masses, and thus be socially useful for propaganda, as Lenin, Stalin, and their official successors in the Soviet Union maintained. However, as members of a purely artistic avant-garde elite, should they divorce themselves, as well as their art, entirely from all social interests, as the more extreme upholders of art for art’s sake have insisted? Alternatively, should they, like Oscar Wilde, be socially concerned in some way, but keep their art and their social ideas essentially separate? (Egbert, 1967: 346)
Ales Erjavec (2015) argues that part of twentieth-century art can be designated specifically as an ‘aesthetic’ avant-garde. The term ‘aesthetic’ itself is of very specific provenance. It derives from Friedrich Schiller’s use of the term. For Schiller, the aesthetic conjoins art, the individual and the community, bringing together the art of the beautiful and the art of living.
Schiller, Ales explains, taking a lead from Ranciere (2004), was the first thinker to connect explicitly the domains of aesthetics and politics, arguing that the problem of politics in practice cannot be approached other than through the problem of the aesthetic because “it is only through Beauty that man makes his way to Freedom”.
Ranciere (2004), discussing what he calls the ‘aesthetic regime of art.’, locates the seeds of modern aesthetic education in the writings of the German Romantic, Friedrich Schiller. Rancière considers that, by suspending the opposition between active understanding and passive sensibility, Schiller’s aesthetic state seeks to break down an idea of society based on the opposition between those who think and decide and those who are doomed to material tasks. This breakdown is achieved using an idea of art. Rancière thereby offers a historical and philosophical account of the link between modern aesthetics and a democratic principle. (Frimer, 2011)
Erjavec, thus, classifies twentieth-century avant-gardes in two ways. First, he divides them into generations: the early twentieth century from 1905-1930; the later neo-avant-gardes emerging in the USA and Europe in the wake of the Second World War; and the postsocialist avant-gardes of Eastern Europe and other post-Soviet-era former-communist countries . Second, he considers that within each generation there is a spectrum running from artistic avant-gardes at one end to aesthetic avant-gardes at the other end. Artistic avant-garde’s introduce into art new styles and techniques, such as those to be found in Cubism and Surrealism. Through such styles and techniques, new representations of the lived world emerge.
At the other end of the spectrum, aesthetic avant-gardes seek to reach beyond art into ‘life’, and aim to transform not just artistic styles and techniques but also the world. The artistic elements of such works are set within an experience-transforming orientation.
Aesthetic avant-gardes seek to affect our ways of experiencing and sensing the world, to change in significant ways the modalities in which we perceive and experience reality. In the words of Jacques Ranciere, they aim at a “redistribution of the sensible”, bringing attention to the ways in which systems of classification assign parts, supply meanings and define relationships among entities in the (common) world.
‘Postsocialist avant-garde’ is the name given by Erjavec (2015) to movements from present or former socialist countries whose art had features common to other avant-garde art of the twentieth century.
Erjavec looks forward to the possibility of a fourth generation ‘aesthetic’ avant-garde.
References
Egbert, D.D. (1967). The Idea of ‘Avant-garde’ in art and politics. American Historical Review, 73 (2), 339–366. Available from http://www.jstor.org/stable/1866164 [Accessed 6 June 2016].
Erjavec, A. (2015). Introduction. In: Erjavec, A., ed. Aesthetic revolutions and twentieth-century avant-garde movements. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1–18.
Frimer, D. (2011). Pedagogical paradigms: Documenta’s reinvention. Art & Education. Available from http://www.artandeducation.net/paper/pedagogical-paradigms-documentas-reinvention/ [Accessed 16 December 2015].
Ranciere, J. (2004). The Politics of aesthetics: the distribution of the sensible. London, UK: Continuum.
RELATED TERMS: Intertextuality; Intersemioticity
In the context of design practices, the concept of authorship is troubled, in part because the purity of the kind of ‘authorship’ that pertains to the writer of a book, as sole author, and the kind of ‘authority’ which accrues to such an author over time, does not often apply to design practice, where elements are borrowed from existing materials and designs and often involves collaborations of various kinds.
The practice of design is, more often that not, re-design. [It might be argued that, retrospectively, the same applies to literary authors, as indeed Barthes did, in that they partake in a broader intertextuality in which and against which their specific text takes shape and differs].
Author is perhaps not a good metaphor for designer. Author and designer differ radically. Perhaps the notion of ‘bricoleur’ may be more appropriate, a terms used by Claude Levi-Strauss for cultural production, recently picked up by Etzio Manzini.
As Susanne Hauser (2017: 50) comments, in discussing the concept of the architect as authoring designer and as artist: “Beginning fifty years ago, the idea of authorship has tended to focus on the elimination or vanishing of the author, rather than on his or her presence or endurance.”
References
Hauser, S. (2017) ‘Design/Entwurf: Observations’, arq: Architectural Research Quarterly, 21(1), pp. 45–51. doi: 10.1017/S1359135517000136
RELATED TERMS: Film making; Graphic Design; Music; Narrative environment design; Performance; Theatre; Human Actantiality; Realism; Reception theory and reader-response criticism; Epic theatre – Brecht
Audience comes from the latin audire meaning to hear. Nonetheless, it is used in film, theatre and performance to describe what might more naturally be called the spectators or viewers, as it is sight that tends to be prioritised in these media.
An audience consists of a person, more usually a group of people, who have gathered to experience a work that is presented to them. While each person has their own experience, they also share a collective experience, at a performance of theatre, music, dance or other performance formats; or the screening of a film.
It is also used as a collective noun to refer to the remote and dispersed groups who experience mass media broadcasts, such as those of television and radio.
The term can also be applied to the readership of a book, newspaper or other printed publication.
From audience to participant in the design of environments
In the context of the design practice, if the participation in a designed environment takes the form of being an audience, for example of a video, this is at the more ‘passive’ end of the spectrum, although this still requires participation, for example, in the form of being able to read and decode the meanings that the text or performance articulates. Because they are often multi-modal and multi-media, it is rare that designed environments call solely for an audience in this sense, which maintains a stage-auditorium relationship or a screen-auditorium relationship. Thus, many designed environments require a more ‘active’ form of participation, both at the level of physical movement and at the level of intellectual engagement which, in turn, may lead to emotional engagement and through that positioning to ethical and political engagement.
The term audience seems to imply that the person or persons attending remain still and/or seated, with the body disengaged from the intellect. At the level of intellectual engagement, a designed environment invites the participant to take part in the meaning production, not simply to receive a fully-developed moral or lesson, and be ready to learn, in which case the designed environment is also a learning environment with its own pedagogic strategies and techniques. It is through this combined physical and intellectual movement, with its various forms of synaesthesia, that a designed environment articulates its emotional import and its truth values, whether material, logical, emotional, ethical or political.
Thus, designed environments, because they do not often retain the stage-auditorium or screen-auditorium as a structuring binary division, encourage audience participation to varying levels, bringing the audience as a whole, or members of it, like some variants of experimental theatre since the 1960s, inside the performance, even to a level that could be considered a form of co-authorship. This has implications for the way we think about designed environments, where those who might be considered the audience are often inside the environment and therefore may, or may be caused to, experience the design as a narrative or a dramaturgy as if they are characters within it, becoming participants in the ‘performance’ or ‘realisation’ of the designed environment.
Even in conventional theatre, where the stage-auditorium divide is rigidly maintained, or indeed in the conventional classroom where the lectern-auditorium divide is similarly maintained, the audience has an effect on the performance. Actors and lecturers often talk about this effect, the way the energy and behaviour of the audience or the students affects their performance, hence giving rise to such notions as good, bad, lively, responsive or unresponsive audiences or students.
Note to follow up: audienceship, the appropriate way to behave as a member of an audience, is a learned behaviour: a theatre audience differs from a cinema audience which in turn differs from an opera audience; and all those from spectator sport audiences (spectators).
Political significance of ‘audience’ in the era of pervasive social media and the ubiquitous interactive screen
Daniel Ross (2018: 11) notes that “a polity of performatively-generated filter bubbles, of ‘audiences’ rather than citizens” has emerged in the 2010s. Such a system, “no longer conforms to the minimum requirements of ‘democracy’ understood as a representative system in which the power to make collective decisions resides in the demos”.
In this context, the ‘Trumpocene’ of 2016-2021 is “a ‘post-democratic’ worldless world in which collective decision becomes strictly speaking impossible, because truth itself, losing its effective actuality, has somehow come to seem an irrelevant and obsolescent criterion.”
References
Bennett, S. (1988) The role of the audience: a theory of production and reception. McMaster University. Available at: https://macsphere.mcmaster.ca/bitstream/11375/6827/1/fulltext.pdf (Accessed: 31 March 2019).
Ross, D. (2018) Introduction. In Stiegler, B. The Neganthropocene. London, UK: Open Humanities Press.
RELATED TERMS: Heidegger; Critical Thinking
See also essay: Arendt, Phenomenology and the Design of Narrative Environments
Why are the writings of Hannah Arendt, 1906-1975, important for design practices?
They are important because she focuses on the active life in its many aspects: we labour, we work, we act and we think or judge, as she puts it. She has a distinct political phenomenology of action that emphasises spatial, perceptual and performative relations; and, within that phenomenology of action, she has a distinctive interest in storytelling and narrative. All of those aspects are important when considering design and Arendt’s thinking permits an opening towards a performative conception of the relations among narrative, environment and human elements of the overall design.
Why does her thinking need to be critiqued and extended?
Her thinking needs to be critiqued and extended because she might seem to treat labour, work, action and thinking/judging as separate spheres in a strict hierarchy, with (political) action at the top, framing thinking/judgment. She might seem to propose an elitist and anti-egalitarian concept of politics, restricting freedom of action to a limited group of wealthy men (heads of households) by following too strictly an ancient Athenian model. Also, she might seem to propose that the sole content of politics is politics itself, as speech or exchange of views, to the exclusion of social or economic policies.
Her work needs to be extended in the direction of allowing these categories to be seen to flow through one another, by means of the bodies and environments that constitute the intersubjective and intercorporeal, or ‘worldliness’ in Arendt’s terms. Rather than the material world being simply the product of work or fabrication, it takes part in articulating labour/life and action/politics and the relations among labour/life, work/world and action/politics. A narrative environment is a domain, a ‘space of appearance’ in Arendt’s terms, of such intersubjective, intercorporeal ‘worldliness’. A dynamic, fluid model of the relationships among labour, work, action and thinking/judging, drawing upon the body in its intercorporeal constitution, a direction opened up by Judith Butler, for example, is needed.
Why does Arendt place such emphasis on the active life, as labour, work, action and thinking/judging?
She creates her categories as part of a process of reversing or inverting the ascendancy of the vita contemplativa (contemplative life) over the vita activa (active life). She perceives the contemplative life, as a withdrawal from action, to have been in the ascendant in Western thinking since Plato, an emphasis strengthened by Christianity, with its notion of ‘otherworldliness’ and postponed gratification or ‘realisation’. Arendt stresses the ‘thisworldliness’ of human reality through labour, work and action. This places her alongside Marx, Nietzsche and Heidegger, each of whom emphasises the active life, although in different ways, and puts the human body at the centre of thought/judgment.
Another purpose in creating her categories is that they provide a means for her to critique Marxian thought about labour, work and action, as the constituents of the vita activa. She seeks to undo what she sees as Marx’s overestimation of the value of labour and work and his underestimation of the value of action, as politics or political action.
Arendt, on the one hand, is critical of the contemplative life. Instead, she proposes a thoughtful life, closely related to action. On the other hand, she is critical of the active life reduced solely to labour and work. Instead, she emphasises the importance of the political life, as action.
Vita activa is Arendt’s interpretation of the Greek notion of praxis, a notion that came to her attention through the work of Heidegger. It is a notion that is also developed by Marx. However, according to Arendt, Marx is mistaken to see the pinnacle of human life as the expression of labour, through which humans come to recognise themselves and their value. Instead, she proposes action as the means whereby humans disclose themselves to one another through word and deed in a specific space of appearance constituting the public realm/public space.
It is this notion of a ‘space of appearance’, constituted through (political) action, which sustains freedom of action, that is of great significance for thinking about the kind of environment, as a ’space of appearance’, that any specific narrative environment can be said to bring into existence.
What does Arendt conceive of as being authentically political?
Arendt’s examples of moments of the authentically political are Greek city states, as well as Greek (tragic) theatre; the Roman res publica; the American Revolution; the French Revolution; the working-class rebellion in Europe from 1848 to the 1930s, particularly the workers’ councils; and, later in her life, the American civil disobedience of the 1960s. For Arendt, “politics is all the more authentic when it is eruptive rather than when it is a regular and already institutionalised practice” (Kateb, 2000: 134-135).
She focuses on these positive examples in order to draw out what she considers to be deeply problematic in the negative examples of German Fascism and Soviet Communism, which she characterises as ’totalitarian’.
The work of Hannah Arendt is useful for considering whether any specific narrative environment acts politically and in what sense it might be argued to do so. This engagement with Arendt’s thought, like that with any other theorist, requires an understanding of both her value and her limitations in conceiving action and the political.
References
Kateb, G. (2000). Political actions: its nature and advantages. In The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, edited by Dana Villa. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Selected Reading List
Arendt, H. (1958) The Origins of totalitarianism. 2nd edn. Cleveland and New York: Meridian Books.
Arendt, H. (1998) The Human condition. introduction by Margaret Canovan. 2nd edn. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Arendt, H. (2005) The Promise of politics. Edited by J. Kohn. New York, NY: Schocken Books.
RELATED TERMS: Distribution of the Sensible – Ranciere; Interaction Design; Narratology; Sculpture; Urban design;
“the sense of architectural space is … related to the political distribution of the sensible and the way it frames reality through fiction.” (Grabar, 2021: 279)
Rowan Moore (2014) argues that it is a terrible misconception to think that architecture is a visual art. To the extent that you do indeed see architecture, it is still not a purely visual experience. When you look at something, you interpret it, you make associations, find memories evoked, gain a greater or lesser sense of the physical efforts and skill that went into making a structure. Architecture does not work with one sense alone, but with synaesthetic hybrids. Synaesthetic hybrids is one way of understanding designed environments and indeed, narrative environments.
Philip Johnson thinks that it is the modern perversion of photography that freezes architecture to three dimensions or, in some buildings, to two dimensions. However, Johnson argues, architecture is surely not the design of space, certainly not the massing or organizing of volumes. These are auxiliary to the main point which is the organization of procession. Architecture exists only in time.
At the dawn of the 21st century, Charles Jencks (2003) perceived the beginnings of a new paradigm emerging in architecture. It related, Jencks thought, to a deep transformation going on in the sciences, which, in time, will permeate all other areas of life. The new sciences of complexity, which concern such notions as fractals, nonlinear dynamics, the new cosmology and self-organising systems, have brought about this change in perspective. We have moved from a mechanistic view of the universe to one that is self-organising at all levels, from the atom to the galaxy. Illuminated by the computer, this new worldview is paralleled by changes now occurring in architecture.
Sam Jacobs (2012) argues that, “Through re-enactment, architecture rewrites itself, making fictions a part of the real landscape that surrounds us.” Understanding architecture in this way opens up the path to the ways in which the materialities of designed environments operate as real-fictions and fictional-realities at once, but with a critical element that draws attention to the constitution of the real, not to any simple acceptance of it ‘being-there’.
Nika Grabar (2021: 267-268) similarly points to the importance of the interweaving of fiction and reality. Grabar cites Ranciere (2022), who argues that fiction is, “the construction of a framework within which subjects, things and situations are seen as belonging to a common world, while events can be identified and linked in terms of coexistence, succession and causal linkage. Fiction is required whenever a certain sense of reality needs to be produced.”
Alessandro Calvi Rollino (2019) notes that formal innovation in architecture provides a means of access to new modes of understanding space and place. This is because, Rollino argues, architecture is one of the most conspicuous media through which a society materialises and reifies the core concepts around which are shaped its values and beliefs. Thus, architecture embodies,
“the way society understands the fundamentals of reality, that is ‘the where’ of entities and their relations” (Rollino, 2019).
References
Derrida, J. (1986). Point de Folie – maintenant l’architecture. Available from http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic1412058.files/Week 8/DerridaPointdeFolie.pdf [Accessed 1 June 2017].
Grabar, N. (2021) Architecture and the distribution of the sensible, Filozofski vestnik, 42(2), pp. 259–280. doi: 10.3986/fv.42.2.12.
Jacob, S. (2012) Make it real: architecture as enactment. Moscow, RU: Strelka Press.
Jencks, C. (2003). The New paradigm in architecture. Hunch. Available from http://www.charlesjencks.com/articles.html [Accessed 8 October 2011].
Johnson, P. (1965). Whence & whither: the processional element in architecture. Perspectiva, 9/10 167–178. Available from http://www.jstor.or/stable/1566915 [Accessed 8 June 2011].
Moore, R. (2014). A masterclass in spatial awareness. [Sensing Spaces : Architecture Reimagined – review]. Observer, 26 January, 33. Available from http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/jan/26/sensing-spaces-royal-academy-review [Accessed 30 January 2014].
Ranciere, J. (2022) Modern times: Temporality in art and politics. Translated by G. Elliott. London, UK: Verso.
Rollino, A. C. (2019) Place and space: a philosophical history, Rethinking Space and Place {Blog]. Available at: https://rethinkingspaceandplace.com/2019/09/12/place-and-space-a-philosophical-history/ (Accessed: 21 August 2024).
Resources
RELATED TERMS: Collecting; Defamiliarisation; Events; Material Culture; New Materialism; Representation; Tangled Hierarchy and Strange Loop
“the thing really names less an object than a particular subject-object relation.” (Brown, 2001: 4)
“Thing theory is at its best … when it focuses on this sense of failure, or partial failure, to name or to classify. Thing theory highlights, or ought to highlight, approaches to the margins—of language, of cognition, of material substance. “Things” do not lie beyond the bounds of reason … but at times they may seem to. That seeming is significant: these are limit cases at which our ordinary categories for classifying signs and substances, meaning and materiality, appear to break down.” (Plotz, 2005: 110)
What the epigraph above from Plotz raises is the question of the relationship between a ‘design’ and a ‘thing’. A design, it could be argued, is easily named and categorised. It is, so to speak, fully ‘scripted’ and ‘framed’ so that what it is, what kind of thing it is and what it does are clearly recognised. Furthermore, its symbolic narration and dramatisation are easily unfolded from this grounded naming and categorising. The wager of some forms of critical design and speculative design is that a ‘design’ may be such that its material qualities, its ‘thingness,’ may interfere with its script and frame, making it susceptible to an analysis using thing theory which allows us to question in specific ways our conventional or accepted techniques of classifying signs and substances. It may become a limit case, in Plotz’s terms. In turn, this may be recognised as a particular instance of defamiliarisation or ‘making strange’. This process may be more effective in the context of what Buchanan (2021) calls levels 1 and 2 of design practice, which concern the design of artefacts and communications, and less effective when it comes to levels 3 and 4 of design practice, which concern system and service (inter-action) design and design as a method for organisational, political, financial or social development, although it might be interesting to experiment with defamilarisation in these latter contexts.
Thing Theory
Since the late 20th century, there has been a ‘return to things’ in the social sciences and humanities, to the extent that Bill Brown (2001), a scholar of American literature, has called for a ‘thing theory’. This movement contravenes an earlier focus on representation and the long scholarly tradition that separated subject from object, mind from matter. Among these approaches, human existence and social life are understood to depend on material things and are entangled with them. People and things are relationally produced (Hodder, 2014), along with, it should be added, the ‘worlds’ in which such ‘things’ are recognised as ‘objective realities’ and the (co-related and simultaneous) ‘worldlessness’ or ‘worldlessnesses’ that such world-forming practices also create.
The design of narrative environments is in accord with these perspectives: in being world forming, narrative environments also create worldlessness, while at the same time creating entities that raise the question the boundary between a ‘design’, replete with value(s), and a ‘thing’, without value or actively dis-valued.
Continue reading “Things”RELATED TERMS: Affordances; Object-Oriented Ontology; Speculative Realism;
Like new materialism, design practice is interested in, “understanding things as active agents rather than passive instruments or backdrops for human activity” (Barnett and Boyle, 2016).
Certain aspects of new materialist thinking, which Sara Ahmed has called white feminist materialism (Hickey-Moody, 2015: 169), may be of value in design practice and for analysing how designs work, for example, its emphasis on meaning production, on the ‘performative’ character of the world and on the fact of being environed by artefacts fashioned by human design. As a theoretical resource, it could be useful to re-think the interrelationships among the material, the agential or actantial and the human dimensions of designs in situ.
Keith Ansell-Pearson argues that although it is stated by some of its proponents that new materialism is a term coined by Rosi Braidotti and Manuel de Landa in the second half of the 1990s (Dolphijn and Tuin 2011: 383), this overlooks the fact that, in the 1960s, Deleuze was using this term in connection with his reading of Spinoza.
New materialism seeks to demonstrate that the mind, in being ‘bodily’, is always already material but that, nevertheless, the mind takes ‘bodiliness’ as its object, and that nature and culture are always already ‘nature cultures’, in Donna Haraway’s term.
New materialism critiques the dualism inherent in transcendental and humanist traditions which still linger in some cultural theory. The transcendental and humanist traditions continue to stir debates that are being opened up by new materialists who seek to shift these dualist structures by allowing for the fluxes of nature and culture, matter and mind, thereby opening up active theory formation. (Dolphijn and Tuin, 2012)
New Materialism as Media Theory
Jussi Parrika (2012) argues that,
“[n]ew materialism is not only about intensities of bodies and their capacities such as voice or dance, of movement and relationality, of fleshyness, of ontological monism and alternative epistemologies of generative matter, and active meaning-making of objects themselves non-reducible to signification. New materialism is already present in the way technical media transmits and processes ‘‘culture,’’ and engages in its own version of the continuum of natureculture (to use Donna Haraway’s term) or in this case, medianatures.”
Parikka uses the term medianatures to make sense of the continuum between mediatic apparatuses and their material contexts in the exploitation of nature.
New materialism as media theory, Parikka suggests, can be seen as the intensive excavation of the materiality of media, where and when that materiality actually is or takes place. This means that materiality is not simply discovered in technological specificity or scientific contexts, for example. Rather, materialism has to be invented continuously anew.
In consequence, Parrika proposes a multiplicity of materialisms. The task of new materialism, therefore, is to address how to think that multiplicity methodologically so that it facilitates a grounded analysis of contemporary culture. This implies being able to talk about non-solids and the processual, the ‘weird materiality’, as Parrika calls it, inherent in the mode of abstraction of technical media, just as much as being able to talk about objects. This step is necessary so that we are able to understand what the specificity of this kind of materialism might be that we encounter, but do not always perceive, in contemporary media culture.
Parikka cautions that it should not be assumed that the agency of matter is always simply ‘good’. The materiality of waste, for example, is one concrete way to think in a more nuanced way about the agency of matter in a new materialist perspective. The materialism of dirt and bad matter is not only about ‘thing-power’ but about how things can disempower through encounters that reduce the vitalities of material assemblages.
References
Ansell-Pearson, K. (2015). Deleuze and new materialism: naturalism, norms and ethics [Essay]. Academia.edu. Available from https://www.academia.edu/20063620/Deleuze_and_New_Materialism_Naturalism_Norms_and_Ethics?auto=view&campaign=weekly_digest [Accessed 17 February 2016].
Barnett, S and Boyle, C. eds. (2016) Rhetoric, through everyday things. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama.
Coole, D. and Frost, S. (eds) (2010) New materialisms: ontology, agency, and politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Dolphijn, R. and van der Tuin, I. (2011), Pushing dualism to an extreme: On the Philosophical Impetus of a new materialism’, Continental Philosophy Review, 44, 383-400.
Dolphijn, R. and van der Tuin, I. (2012). New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies, Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press. Available at: http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.11515701.0001.001 Accessed on 29 July 2014
Hickey-Moody, A. (2015). Manifesto: The rhizomatics of practice as research. In: Arts, Pedagogy and Cultural Resistance. London, UK: Rowman & Littlefield.
Parikka, J. (2012) Forum: New materialism new materialism as media theory: Medianatures and dirty matter, Communication and Critical/ Cultural Studies, 9(1), pp. 95–100. doi: 10.1080/14791420.2011.626252.
For a discussion of the many lines of flight of new materialism, see New Materialist Cartographies
RELATED TERMS: Actor-Network Theory; Collage, Montage, Assemblage and Bricolage; Biopolitics and Biopower; Cinema and Film Theory; Disciplinary Societies and Societies of Control; Distribution of the Sensible; Genealogy – Nietzsche; Practice
” ‘échafaudage‘ is the term Axelos suggests best translates the Heideggerian notion of das Ge-stell, usually translated as ‘en-framing,’ or, in French, as arraissonment or dispositif.” (Elden, 2015: 15)
A narrative environment could be conceived as a ‘dispositif’ or a concrete social apparatus, understood as a ‘practical system’; or as being inscribed or situated within an apparatus. Other terms with similar or overlapping meanings which are used in this context are ‘agencement‘ and ‘assemblage‘ and possibly ‘arrangement’ and ‘distribution’.
Jerome Fletcher notes that the term ‘apparatus’ is often used as a translation of the French term dispositif, a term employed initially by Foucault and elaborated by Agamben and Deleuze. In this usage, apparatus does not simply refer to a mechanism, device or physical object, such as, for example, computer hardware, but is more like an arrangement, for example, of hardware, software, code, writing, performance, usage, texts, ideology, writers, readers, coders, decoders, executions (of programs) and so on, together.
Continue reading “Apparatus – Dispositif”RELATED TERMS: Sociology; Ethnomethodology; Agency; Actor Network Theory; Cyborg Anthropology
Anthropological research may provide some methodological guidance in the understanding of design practices as complex socio-cultural, techno-economic practices. For example, Anusas and Harkness (2014) suggest that, “in both anthropology and design … there is and perhaps always should be a concern with that other which is possible. Work in both realms can possess this critical orientation towards the possibility of difference.” Thus, both anthropology and design can be seen as practices that share a concern with alternative and possible others: “the others of contemporary cultures; the other and multiple histories revealed in reinterpretations; the other ways of living that might emerge with alternative shapings of the future” (Anusas and Harkness, 2014). Such others, Anusas and Harkness (2014) continue, are intertwined: reinterpretations of the past influence formations of the future; and vice versa.
Much like the discipline of anthropology since the 1980s, design practices are concerned to engage with two sets of closely interrelated terms. As listed by Ortner (1984), they are practice, praxis, action, interaction, activity, experience, performance, on the one hand; and, on the other hand, the doer of all that doing, agent, actor, person, self, individual, subject. It is in the context of the relationship or, more properly, the entanglement, of the doer and the doing that the notions of actant and actantiality have arisen, for example in the context of actor-network theory.
The use of terms such as actantiality seeks to de-centre the subject as the sole source and origin of meaning-production, knowledge production and action. The aim is to understand how meaning-production, knowledge-production and agency are distributed among human, non-human and more-than-human actants. All such actants may be said to be non-originary or, in other words, equally originary. This is a situation for which the Derridean term différance or the Buddhist concept of co-dependent arising, dependent co-arising or interdependent co-arising may be appropriate. The notions of actant-network and actant-rhizome also seek to engage with such distributed non-originary agency.
Ortner further comments that even though she has taken practice to be the key symbol of the anthropology of the 1980s, another key symbol might equally have been chosen: history. The set of terms clustered around history includes time, process, duration, reproduction, change, development, evolution and transformation. Taking history as the key term, the theoretical shift in anthropology, rather than being seen as a move from structures and systems to persons and practices, might instead be seen as a shift from static, synchronic analyses to diachronic, processual ones. Seen in this light, the shift to practice becomes one wing in the move to diachrony, one which emphasises micro-developmental processes-transactions, projects, careers, developmental cycles, and so on.
The other wing of the move to diachrony, the macro-processual or macro-historical. itself has at least two trends, Ortner argues. The first, the political economy school, seeks to understand change in the small-scale societies typically studied by anthropologists by relating that change to large-scale historical developments, especially colonialism and capitalist expansion, external to the societies in question. The second is a more ethnographic kind of historical investigation, paying greater attention to the internal developmental dynamics of particular societies over time.
Design practices are attentive to the concepts clustered around practice and agency; to the concepts clustered around history and change; to the practices of ordinary living; and to the intertwining of the local and small scale with the more global and large scale.
Design practices seek to take into account all three aspects of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s (1967:61) epigraph: “Society is a human product. Society is an objective reality. Man is a social product”. In other words, design practices acknowledge that society is a system, the system is powerfully constraining, yet the system can be made and unmade through human action and interaction. In addition, however, design practices further recognise that human action and interaction is thoroughly mediated by designs of different kinds and dimensions. Design practices are also aware of the paradox that although the human world is pervaded by designs of different ages, kinds and scales, the world as a whole is not ‘designed’ as such; or, rather, does not adhere to a single, homogeneous design.
A further paradox is that although actors’ intentions are accorded central place, major social change does not for the most part come about as an intended consequence of such actions. Change is largely a by-product, an unintended consequence of action, however rational action may have been (Ortner, 1984). Thus, to say that society and history are products of human action is true only in a certain paradoxical sense. They are rarely the outcomes the actors themselves set out to achieve. As Michel Foucault puts it: “People know what they do; they frequently know why they do what they do; but what they don’t know is what what they do does”. (Personal communication, quoted in Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1983, 187).
Design practices thoroughly engage with these paradoxes, inherent in design processes: design outcomes diverge from design intention; and design practices are most often engaged with situations that are themselves the unintended consequences of prior design intentions and actions. They are in that sense re-designs in a process of continual re-designing.
Digital ethnography is the exploration of the impact of digital technologies on cultures and the constraints of cultures on the development of digital technologies.
Physical Anthropology
Physical anthropology has re-positioned itself in recent decades within the larger field of evolutionary biology. Along with this repositioning, it has developed and incorporated new techniques as well as the recognition of broader responsibilities in the modern world. Many programmes formerly known as ‘physical anthropology’ have changed their names, most commonly to biological anthropology. A more accurate name might be ‘evolutionary anthropology’, reflecting the fact that the core of the discipline is the study of human evolution and that the guiding theoretical framework is evolutionary theory (Ellison, 2018).
References
Anusas, M. and Harkness, R. (2014) Things Could Be Different: Design Anthropology as Hopeful, Critical, Ecological, in Ethnographies of the Possible Seminar, April 10th, 2014, Aarhus, DK, The Research Network for Design Anthropology. Available at: https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/48850/ (Accessed: 23 August 2022).
Berger, Peter, and Luckmann, Thomas. 1967. The Social Construction of Reality. Garden City, New York: Doubleday.
Dreyfus, H. L. and Rabinow, P. (1983) Michel Foucault: beyond structuralism and hermeneutics. 2nd edn. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Ellison, P. T. (2018) The evolution of physical anthropology. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 165, 615–625. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.23408
Ortner, S. B. (1984) Theory in anthropology since the sixties, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 26(1), pp. 126–166. doi: 10.1017/S0010417500010811
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