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Sloterdijk and the Design of Narrative Environments [Essays]

1. Envelopes

Bruno Latour points out that when it is said that ‘Dasein is thrown into the world’ [1], as does Heidegger, the significance of the preposition ‘into’ is often overlooked. Peter Sloterdijk, however, Latour notes, does not overlook it and indeed dwells on it, asking such questions as: ‘into what is Dasein thrown?’, ‘where is Dasein thrown?’ and, perhaps more mischievously, what is the temperature there, the colour of the walls, the materials chosen, the technology for disposing of refuse, the cost of the air conditioning, and so on. Have you, as an exemplum of Dasein, Sloterdijk asks by way of clarification, been ‘thrown’ or cast into a room or into an air-conditioned amphitheatre? Alternatively, are you ‘outside’?

Iconic Designs, Critical Designs

RELATED TERMS: Iconic Designs and Iconic Designers; Imaginary

The Iconic

As acknowledged in Iconic Designs and Iconic Designers, the iconic approach to design is not wholly without merit. For example, it recognises that designs have cultural meanings and other-than-utilitarian uses, such as in the construction, maintenance and performance of self-hood and social standing. In other words, the notion of iconicity draws attention to designs as important socio-cultural phenomena or actants in everyday social practices and material public discourses.

The reservation expressed about the iconic approach to design was that, in as far as it seems to depend on a prior approach to art which emphasises titled ‘works’ and named ‘artists’, it might place design practice in a secondary or derivative position to art practice. ‘Iconic’ designs, considered as ‘works’, may be thought of as approaching, but never quite reaching, the value of an ‘art-work’. Iconic designers, equally, may be thought to approach the status of artists but never quite achieving it.

Designing, Theorising, Modelling [Snippets 6]

“[in the UK in the 1970s,] There was a Chinese takeaway in almost every town. They had proliferated in the post-war years as a new wave of Chinese immigrants from Hong Kong took over fish and chip shops, first in Liverpool, then in Manchester and beyond, moving into existing businesses, gradually adding their Chinese dishes to the original menus.” (Dunlop, 2023)

George Saunders (2022) writes that,

“Neuroscientists now suggest that the mind is always doing a form of fiction writing: proposing a broad scale model for the moment that is occurring, then improving that model by way of sensory input. Strangely, this revision process apparently occurs from the back of the brain (broad, early draft) to the front (final product, ie, this moment). The approximate, first-draft model (“This seems to be a restaurant”) gets modified towards greater precision (“A barbecue restaurant that is … in the process of being robbed?”) and then the whole thing may, most truthfully, become a series of unmediated observations (“People running, broken glass, smell of burning meat, man cowering under table holding single French fry”).”

Discourse provocation: Could the insight borrowed from neuroscience by Saunders be extended to suggest that the mind is always doing a form of designing? In this extended sense, the modelling involves theorising inter-relationships among processes of narrating, environing, situating and dramatising.

Designing, Psycho-Semiosis, Bio-Semiosis [Snippets 5]

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Hephzibah Anderson (2022) reviews Rachel Aviv’s first book, Strangers to Ourselves: Stories of Unsettled Minds. The book, according to Anderson, is a subtle and penetrating investigation into how ‘mental illness’ is diagnosed. It brings to attention the ways in which the diagnostic language used is far from neutral. Rather, Aviv suggests, such language, “moulds a patient’s innermost self, promising to explain who they are by weaving narratives that free and entrap” (Anderson, 2022). “There are stories that save us, and stories that trap us,” in the words of Aviv (cited by Kisner, 2022)

Aviv’s book also brings to attention two competing approaches to ‘mental illness’: the Freudian, which endorses introspective therapy to promote ‘understanding’ of the fundamental personal and social maladjustments producing the distress; and the pharmaceutical, which proposes that, for example, depression is a natural, biochemical phenomenon that requires psychopharmacology (Kisner, 2022).

Although not addressed in this snippet, Aviv also discusses the roles that injustice and inequality play in mental distress.

Snippet Methodology: Authoring-Curating [Snippets 4]

RELATED TERMS: Collage, Montage, Assemblage and Bricolage

Thrownness, Givenness, Foundness

In his book Reality Hunger (2010), part of David Shields’ argument is that non-fiction is better adapted than fiction to address the realities of the modern world (Morrison, 2019). In the book, he defended his habit of quoting authors without attribution as a principled stand against copyright laws, but he also now links it to masochism: it was a way to be bad and therefore to be punished.

In The Trouble With Men (2019), the basic method remains the same. His argument is set out through a collage of thematically linked fragments. He is both author and curator. However, in this later book, the writers he draws on are given their due in square brackets.

Narratives of Willpower; Narratives of Disease [Snippets 3]

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“We’re transitioning from the personal failure, lacking willpower, lacking self-control narrative, to this narrative that says ‘Obesity is a disease, you need a prescribed cure’ … so we can sell weight-loss medication”.
(Marquisele Mercedes, quoted in Kuchler, 2022).

The context for this quote from Marquisele Mercedes, a doctoral student in public health at Brown University in Providence, Rhode island, is a discussion of what might be called the ‘obesity crisis’: by 2030, nearly 50% of Americans are expected to be obese; worldwide, rates of obesity have tripled since 1975, such that there were 650 million obese adults in 2016, according to the World Health Organisation. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) concluded in 2019 that developed countries’ plans to tackle obesity were, for the most part, failing.

Investing, Narration, Theorisation [Snippets 2]

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A narrative of the ‘past’ is taking shape in the ‘present’ in contrast to which other narratives of the ‘future’, in the form of ‘bets’, are developing. The historical or hindsight narrative suggests that the 30 years from the 1990s to the early 2020s constituted a ‘golden’ age, a period of steady growth and stable inflation. The futuristic or foresight narrative suggests that what is coming is an era of instability. A simple duality is orders this transition: from stability to instability.

However, instability narratives which can serve as the basis for investing are difficult to sustain, as Martin comments:

“The horror show in stocks is dragging on to its third consecutive quarter, and the stories fund managers tell themselves to try to understand the world (‘narratives’, to use the grander term) are just constantly failing to stick. Rabobank describes it as ‘the maddening market pendulum’.”
(Martin, 2022)

Thus, a ‘bet’ on a coming recession in the United States in 2022, itself a replacement for a failed ‘bet’ on inflation having peaked, has already come ‘unstuck’, to use Martin’s metaphorical vocabulary.

Politics, Reality, Narrativity [Snippets 1]

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Unending Discourse

The entries in this Snippets series are cut from larger texts. Although not explicitly focused on design practices, they operate as discourse-collage elements that aim to provoke broader discussions about the potential ethico-political value of what might otherwise be taken solely as the aesthetic value of design practices, particularly those that incorporate narrative strategies. To paraphrase Timothy Garton Ash (2022), they are simply elements that need to be embedded in a larger theory.

Politics, Reality, Narrativity

“Since these are merely incremental steps, they must be embedded in a larger narrative. The politics of the past decade, including those that led to the vote for Brexit, reminds us that a compelling narrative is as important as what technocrats call reality. In fact, a good narrative helps create a political reality.”
(Garton Ash, 2022)

The context for this quote is a discussion of what would be an appropriate agenda for the resetting of the relationship between the post-Johnsonian, post-Brexit UK and the European Union. Garton Ash in this article also evokes Jean Monnet, one of the primary architects of European integration. Monnet suggested that, when facing an apparently irresolvable problem, one move would be to broaden the context. Parallels might be drawn here between ‘broadening the context’ and ‘widening the narrative’ by, for example, introducing a meta-narrative, on the one hand; and ‘changing the frame’, on the other hand, by altering the perspective or taking multiple perspectives.

Mono No Aware and Ma

RELATED TERMS: Sabi and Wabi Sabi

The human-environmental interactive dimensions of the design of narrative environments may be enhanced by a consideration of Japanese aesthetics expressed through design principles. Beginning in the Heian era (794-1185), the Japanese developed a distinct sense of aesthetic perception, including such experiences as mono no aware, ma and wabi sabi. Each of these notions carries a sense of understated aesthetic experience which guide perceptions and feelings toward the natural and the cultural environment or, dare we say, the ‘technological’ environment, as that which supplements the natural – both takes the place of (supplants) and adds to (augments). Furthermore, each of these aesthetics relies upon the participants’ keen sense of their surroundings, their mindful perception of their (own and shared) experience and the dynamic relationships between them.

Narrative Environments

“Every story is a travel story – a spatial practice.” (De Certeau, 1984:115)

A narrative environment is a many-dimensional, orientational interface. In one direction, it makes the world comprehensible and navigable. In another direction, it opens up to the challenges that the world presents or harbours. It may explain, but in doing so it also questions; it may settle yet it also unsettles; it may ground but it also un-grounds and re-grounds. It is here, there and elsewhere; it is now, then and of other times. Another way of seeking to understand its status is to say that a narrative environment is an argument about the real, in the real.