Incomplete ...

Design, Narratives, Pasts

RELATED TERMS: Design, Narratives, Futures

Jean-Francois Lyotard (1984) contended that we were finished with grand narratives or master narratives or narratives of mastery. Nevertheless, in 2017, George Monbiot contended that the political history of the second half of the 20th century could be summarised as the conflict between its two great narratives: the stories told, first, by Keynesian social democracy and, afterwards, by neoliberalism.

Some years prior to Monbiot’s statement, Bruno Latour (2009) had declared that the present historical situation may be defined by a complete disconnect between two great alternative narratives. The first concerns emancipation, detachment, modernisation, progress and mastery. The other, concerns attachment, precaution, entanglement, dependence and care.

Alltäglichkeit

RELATED TERMS: The Everyday and Design; Alienation

Alltäglichkeit – Lefebvre, Lukács, Heidegger

Alltäglichkeit is a German word meaning everydayness. Michel Trebitsch (2014: 13) highlights a curious affinity between Georg Lukács and Henri Lefebvre, by way of Heidegger, concerning the use of that term. The issue for design practices, from the perspective of Incomplete …, concerns a questioning of the lowly status assigned to everydayness, whether as inauthenticity, alienation or simply triviality. The everyday, it is held here, is the site wherein those practices that generate such distinctions as the ontological difference are enacted, questioned, un-done and re-done through their reflexive ‘transcendental empiricism’, to use a paradoxical phrase coined by Deleuze ^[1].

The young Lukács, in his pre-Marxist period, formulated the concept of Alltäglichkeit in 1911 in a passage of Metaphysik der Tragödie. For Lukacs, Alltäglichkeit designated the ‘trivial’, inauthentic life of the human being, the dreary, mechanical and repetitive unfolding of the everyday (Trebitsch, 2014: 13). Lukács contrasts this mode of living with an ‘authentic’ life in which the human being accedes to themselves through the work of art or, even better, turns themselves into a work of art.

Finnegans Wake (and Design)

RELATED TERMS: Design: Incomplete Conjectures

“The Wake, fin negans, begets only beginnings but invalidates all origins…” (Rabaté, 1984: 79)

In the understanding of design being constructed in the Incomplete … website, design can be grasped in four main modalities: as a set of professional practices, sub-divided by (industrial era and digital era) designed outputs; as academic discipline, partly organised by the divisions within professional practice but also open to potential inter-disciplinarity and trans-disciplinarity; as a major element of material cultural practices, or ‘the everyday’ and everyday interactions, perhaps even ‘the real’ as phenomenality; and as material public discourse, taking part in informing, teaching, governing and constituting publics as addressees, or ‘you’ as interpellant, respondent and inter-actant. The urban environment is saturated with the outputs of design practices which come together in various non-preconceived assemblages as material public culture. Design as academic (inter)discipline opens a space for reflection upon the relationship between design as professional practice and the public agency or actantiality of design assemblies or ecologies.

Fordism and Post-Fordism

RELATED TERMS: Actantiality; Disciplinary Societies and Societies of Control; Remembering;

Introduction: Design practices, political-economic and socio-cultural conditions

Design practices are contextualised by the political-economic and the socio-cultural circumstances in which they are invented and deployed as specific responses that are considered appropriate to those circumstances. For example, design practices may take up different roles in a Fordist political-economy to a post-Fordist one. It is further argued, however, that design practices have the potential to break with those circumstances, to alter the context reflexively.

User-Centred and User-Driven Design

Koskinen and Thomson (2012: 79) differentiate between user-centred design and user-driven design.

User-centred design means that design innovation is focused on users’ needs and the delivery of new benefits to them in their use of products, services, environments, systems, and so on. A user-centred approach, they contend, is a strong support to incremental innovation.

User-driven design implies that innovation comes from users, leading to new approaches and methods to engaging end-users in the design process from the outset.

References

Koskinen, T. and Thomson, M. (2012). Design for Growth & Prosperity. Brussels: European Commission. Available from https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/a207fc64-d4ef-4923-a8d1-4878d4d04520 [Accessed 10 October 2014].

Feminism and Materialism

Spatial practices, and not only in Western countries, are radically gendered. Feminist analyses, particularly those that emphasise the performative character of gender ‘identity’ as processes of identification, which focus on material conditions of living and which bring to attention the significance of practices of the body in the constitution of spatiality, are therefore of great value in the design of narrative environments.

Ontological Turn

RELATED TERMS: New Materialism; Ontological Designing; Ontology; Performance and Performativity; Practice;

According to Andrew Pickering (2017), citing Woolgar and Lezaun (2013, 2015) and Kelly (2014), the social-constructivist consensus has broken down in the early 21st century. In response, both anthropology and science and technology studies have taken an ontological turn. This ontological turn in science and technology studies, Pickering contends, grew out of a prior turn to practice from the 1980s onwards (Pickering 1992).

Hermeneutics

RELATED TERMS:

“Three masters, seemingly mutually exclusive, dominate the school of suspicion: Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. It is easier to show their common opposition to a phenomenology of the sacred, understood as a propaedeutic to the ‘revelation’ of meaning, than their interrelationship within a single method of demystification.”

Ricoeur, 1970: 32)

By way of general introduction to the idea of a history of the techniques of interpretation from the Greek grammarians to our own day, Foucault proposes that it would be possible to say that language, in the Indo-European cultures at least, has always given birth to two kinds of suspicions: that language does not mean exactly what it says; and that language exceeds its verbal form in some way, so that there are other things in the world which speak and which are not language.

Deconstruction – Derrida

RELATED TERMS: Heidegger;

“Deconstruction is inventive or it is nothing at all; it does not settle for methodical procedures, it opens up a passageway, it marches ahead and marks a trail; its writing is not only performative, it produces rules — other conventions — for new performativities and never installs itself in the theoretical assurance of a simple opposition between performative and constative.” (Derrida, 2007: 23)

1 Destruktion, Deconstruction, (De)Construction and Deconstructionism

It is not possible to use the word ‘deconstruction’, which itself is a value or stands for a certain set of values in terms of academic inquiry, without evoking a chain of associations, for example, to German philosophy of the early 20th century, French philosophy of the mid-20th century, the American re-articulation of these philosophical traditions in the latter part of the 20th century and the controversies surrounding the term that subsequently arose through “the American invention of French theory” (Cusset, 2008: xiv).

Povinelli

Since the beginning of the 21st century, Elizabeth Povinelli argues, critical theoretical discourses have been marked by a particular style and approach. They have shifted, she suggests, from hermeneutic and deconstructive methods of reading towards a set of methods of knowledge production informed by mathematically-inspired philosophy and the natural sciences. A number of names have been given to this emergent field: the ontological turn; new materialism; and posthumanism.

Despite the variety of names given, Povinelli ascribes a common thread to these scholarly efforts. She contends that these scholars are seeking to imagine a form of political solidarity that is grounded in the entanglement of human, other-than-human and more-than-human existents [or inter-actants]. Thus, Povinelli suggests that, despite the variety of discourses under these headings, they can all be taken to be making the ontological claim, in different ways, that ‘existence is entangled’. Two of the major theorists that Povinelli cites in this context are Karen Barad and Donna Haraway. Haraway, with her emphasis on species entanglement and symbiogenetic kinship, aims to establish the basis of an anticapitalist, antiracist, posthuman feminist perspective (Povinelli, 2021: 17).

References

Povinelli, E. A. (2021) Between Gaia and ground. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.