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Intersectionality

RELATED TERMS: Afrofuturism; Afro-Pessimism; Critical Race Theory; Identity Politics; Whiteness Studies

Beginning in the 1970s and continuing through the 1980s, critical legal scholars, such as Richard Delgado, Patricia Williams, Mari Matsuda and Alan Freeman, began publishing work that developed the discourse around race, power and law. Together, they advanced the idea that the law, rather than being a neutral system based on objective principles, operated to reinforce established social hierarchies (Cobb, 2021).

In 1989, Kimberle Crenshaw contributed a concept that became one of the best-known elements of critical race theory. The idea was expressed in a 1989 article, ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.’ Her central argument concerned the notion of ‘intersectionality’. As Miriyam Aouargh (2019: 16) explains, when Crenshaw initially coined the term, it was in response to a court case against discrimination in which the judge had rejected a plea based on the plaintiff being black and female. He argued that she should make a choice: to pursue the case either against racism or against sexism. In his opinion, it could not be both. The notion of intersectionality was a way to accommodate the reality that any one (legal) person has multiple (social) identities that cause overlapping oppressions. In this sense, intersectionality, understood as an interface, brings to attention the ways in which people who belong to more than one marginalised community can be overlooked by anti-discrimination law. In many ways, this was a distillation of the kinds of problems that critical race theory addressed (Cobb, 2021).

Hill Collins and Bilge (2016) define the importance of intersectionality in the following terms:

“Intersectionality is a way of understanding and analyzing the complexity in the world, in people, and in human experiences. The events and conditions of social and political life and the self can seldom be understood as shaped by one factor. They are generally shaped by many factors in diverse and mutually influencing ways. When it comes to social inequality, people’s lives and the organization of power in a given society are better understood as being shaped not by a single axis of social division, be it race or gender or class, but by many axes that work together and influence each other. Intersectionality as an analytic tool gives people better access to the complexity of the world and of themselves.”

Intersectionality and Identity-Based Politics

The notion of intersectionality came to be associated with identity-based politics. The process of recognising that which was formerly perceived as isolated and individual as social and systemic is one that characterised the identity politics of African Americans, other people of colour, gays and lesbians and other marginalised groups. For these groups, Crenshaw (1991) argues, identity-based politics has been a source of strength, community and intellectual development.

Design and Intersectionality

The concern for design practices in relation to intersectionality and identity-based politics is the extent to which certain affordances are offered for particular identities or subject positions over others, perhaps through the design of avatars by means of which social subjects are addressed and drawn into particular design worlds, whether material or digital. Does the design hierarchise social identities, for example, in presenting intersections among homosexuality, race, cultural renewal and self-formation, or exclude particular social identities? How is the design implicated in, for example, the production of whiteness and masculinity? Does the design seek to generate or acknowledge new intersections?

References

Aouragh, M. (2019) “White privilege” and shortcuts to anti-racism, Race and Class, 61(2), pp. 3–26. doi: 10.1177/0306396819874629.

Cobb, J. (2021) ‘The Man Behind Critical Race Theory’, The New Yorker, (13 September). Available at: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/20/the-man-behind-critical-race-theory? (Accessed: 8 August 2022).

Crenshaw, K. (1989) ‘Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory, and antiracist politics’, University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1, pp. 139–167. Available at: https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf/vol1989/iss1/8 (Accessed: 10 August 2022).

Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the margins: intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color, Stanford Law Review, Vol. 43, No. 6 (Jul., 1991), pp. 1241-1299.

Hill Collins, P. and Bilge, S. (2016) Intersectionality. Malden, MA: Polity Press.

Cyborg Anthropology

RELATED TERMS: Anthropology; Actor-Network Theory; Ethnomethodology; Avatar

A cyborg anthropologist looks at how humans and non human objects interact with each other, and how that changes culture.

Another aspect of cyborg anthropology concerns how the self can be extended, doubled or multiplied, online, through identification with an avatar. This, in turn, opens to the study of how people interact with each other through such techno-social interactions, in addition to the ways in which they interact in embodied social situations.

Actor Network Theory has been applied in cyborg anthropology in order to analyse the fluid exchange between technological actors and human actors. This is especially valuable since the technologies being studied actively dismantle our ontological pre-suppositions as to what constitutes a ‘human’ or a ‘technology’.

Cyborg anthropology is a subspecialty, launched in 1993, at the Annual Meetings of the American Anthropological Association (AAA). Within the AAA, cyborg anthropology is associated with the Committee for the Anthropology of Science, Technology and Computing (CASTAC).

Resources

Cyborg Anthropology website

Avatar

RELATED TERMS:

The word avatar has a number of definitions, for example, it may mean the incarnation of a Hindu deity, especially Vishnu, in human or animal form; an incarnate divine teacher; an embodiment or manifestation, as of a quality or concept; a temporary manifestation or aspect of a continuing entity; or an icon, graphic or other image by which a person represents themselves on a communications network or in a virtual community, such as a chatroom or multiplayer game. In another sense, it may be taken to mean the various representations, identifications, and internalisations that make up a person’s intra-psychic world and which are the elements of their overall sense of self.

As Ralitza Petit (2011) points out, until the late 1980s, the word avatar was used solely in the context of Hindu myths, particularly in discussions of embodiment and incarnation. Derived from from the Sanscrit word for ‘descent’, avatar or avatara in this Hindu context refers to the manifestation or appearance of an alternate body by means of which a Hindu deity descends to earth, a body that frequently merges human and animal forms.

The idea has been transferred to literature, film and online gaming so that avatar is now taken to mean the counterpart to the human body within such media. This can be seen in the context of the processes of exosomatisation, extending the body towards extra-bodily, mediated experiences that are nevertheless still embodied. Thus, in digital online environments, the avatar becomes the human body’s visual counterpart. In this way, the avatar has become as essential to the state of ‘digital-virtual’ being (avatarial embodiment) as the ’embodied’ self is to being-in-the-‘flesh’ (corporeal embodiment).

As Klevjer (2006) expresses it, in the context of the computer game, the avatar,

“exploits the digital computer’s unique capacity for realistic simulation, and acts as a mediator of the player’s embodied interaction with the gameworld, The relationship between the player and the avatar is a prosthetic relationship; through a process of learning and habituation, the avatar becomes an extension of the player’s own body. Via the interface of screen, speakers and controllers, the player incorporates the computer game avatar as second nature, and the avatar disciplines the player’s body.”
(Klevjer, 2006: 10)

The avatar gives, “the player a subject-position within a simulated environment, a vicarious body through which the player can act as an agent in a fictional world” (Klevjer, 2006: 10).

Avatar or Fashion Design? Design Museum Copenhagen

Avatar, body, subjectivity and spatiality

As Petit (2011: 93) explains, the human body, understood instrumentally, has been taken as a privileged device for measuring space throughout the history of architecture. This conception can be found in antiquity, in the work of Vitruvius, the Renaissance, in the work of Leonardo da Vinci and Leon Battista Alberti and in modernity, in the work of Le Corbusier. The avatar, alternatively, presents a new paradigm of referencing. More than a physical or psychoanalytical measure of space, an avatar in an online environment becomes the originating code by means of which the body’s spatial context is not only evaluated but created.

Petit notes that in the Humanist tradition no two human subjects are identical. Nevertheless, by focusing upon the relative similarity in uprightness, height range and the predictability of human bodily movement, architectural practice has assumed that the human figure permits an anthropocentric understanding of space that is effectively universal. This presumed universality lends to architecture a certain stability, through anthropomorphic systems of measurement and legibility. The avatar reverses this humanist logic, Petit contends.

Thus, Petit (2011: 95) argues that the space of virtual worlds is specifically constructed by and around its constituent avatars. This is unlike the modernist conception of a universal space by which the subject is surrounded and received. The avatar, by contrast, is crucial to the definition of a virtual space in the process of representing that space to the player. Spatial representation is established through the supremacy of the avatar. Spatiality, thus conceived, does not exist independently of the avatar.

Picking up on this difference in the relationship between ‘body’ and ‘space’ in humanistic and digital environments, Bob Rehak (2003: 103) notes that the video game avatar, which is presented as a human player’s double, merges spectatorship and participation in ways that fundamentally transform both activities.

In discussions of virtual reality (VR) and online gaming, the relationship between player and avatar is assumed to be a transparent, one-to-one correspondence. However, Rehak insists that the heterogeneity of players and their avatars should not be elided. They exist in an unstable dialectic. Players experience games through the exclusive intermediary the avatar, an ‘other’ whose ‘eyes’, ‘ears’ and ‘body’ are components of a complex technological and psychological apparatus.

Just as one does not unproblematically equate a glove with the hand inside it, one should not presume that the subjectivity produced by video games or other implementations of VR transparently correspond to, and thus substitute for, the player’s own subjectivity. This remains the case even though it is precisely this presumption that appears necessary to secure and maintain a sense of ‘immersion’ in ‘cyberspace’.

To obscure the difference between players and their game-generated subjectivities is to elide questions of ideological mystification and positioning which are inherent to interactive technologies of the imaginary (Rehak, 2003: 104).

References

Klevjer, R. (2006) What is the avatar: fiction and embodiment in avatar-based singleplayer computer games [Dr.Polit. thesis]. Department of Information Science and Media Studies, University of Bergen. Available at: https://folk.uib.no/smkrk/docs/RuneKlevjer_What%20is%20the%20Avatar_finalprint.pdf (Accessed: 14 July 2022).

Moore, H. L. (2012) ‘Avatars and robots: The imaginary present and the socialities of the inorganic’, Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, 30(1), pp. 48–63. Available at: http://www.jstor.com/stable/43610889 (Accessed: 10 March 2021).

Petit, R. (2011) ‘The Ego Inc’, Perspecta, 44, pp. 92–101, 200–201. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41662950 (Accessed: 9 March 2021).

Rehak, B. (2003) ‘Playing at being: psychoanalysis and the avatar’, in Wolf, M. J. P. and Perron, B. (eds) The Video game theory reader. New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 103–127.

Design: Dramatisation and Narrativisation

RELATED TERMS: Theatre; Epic Theatre; Tragic Theatre – Aristotle; Theatre of Cruelty

“The tension between the endless desire that is the source of human motivations and the hopeless demands that fail to appease it is the very heart of the human tragedy, according to Lacan.”
Mansfield, 2000: 46)

In as far as designs intervene in existing entanglements of socio-cultural situations embedded in techno-natural situations, and vice versa, design practices may engage with processes of dramatisation and narrativisation. This is in line with the conception that techno-genesis and socio-genesis are mutually entwined through the processes of exosomatisation. While narrative and drama are most often woven together in practice through plot – narratives involve dramatic incidents while dramas involve narrative sequences – they may be distinguished for analytical reasons.

The designer may therefore consider how the design enters into the drama of the situation, heightening, extending or resolving a dramatic tension, or takes part in the movement of events as part of a narrative progression. Designing, in other words, may be considered as part of dramatisation, as part of (story) telling; or as part of the dramatisation of story telling through the arrangement of plot. This may affect decisions as to which modes and media of communication are drawn upon in the design, impacting the balance between ‘telling’ and ‘showing’.

References

Mansfield, N. (2000) Subjectivity: theories of the self from Freud to Haraway. St Leonard’s, NSW: Allen & Unwin.

Resources

Sorkin, A. and Wilson, J. (2022) Aaron Sorkin. [Interview with John Wilson in This Cultural Life series on the BBC Sounds platform]. Available at https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00161mc [Accessed 13 July 2022]

Aaron Sorkin discusses the distinctions that exist under the umbrella term ‘writer’. He focuses on the differences between being a playwright and being a screenwriter, but implicitly he also distinguishes those two roles and that of the novelist. All three writerly roles deal with ‘dramatisation’ but in different ways. Although having worked on stage plays, television dramas and cinema films, Sorkin sees himself primarily as a writer of radio plays because, for him, it is the rhythm and flow of the verbal dialogue which holds his interest.

Afrofuturism

RELATED TERMS: Afro-Pessimism; Black Studies; Critical Race Theory; Intersectionality; Identity Politics

Afrofuturism has been defined as a cultural aesthetic that combines science-fiction, history and fantasy. It aims to connect those from the black diaspora with their forgotten African ancestry (Tate, No Date). ‘The Comet,’ a short story by W. E. B. DuBois that represents DuBois’ foray into fantasy in 1920, is said to have helped lay the foundation for the paradigm that came to be known as Afrofuturism (Ogbunu, 2020). While its beginnings may be said to lie in African-American science fiction, such as the writings of DuBois, Octavia Butler and Samuel R. Delany, it now refers to literature, music and visual art that explores the African-American experience. In particular, it draws attention to the role of slavery in that experience.

Mark Dery, while coining the term Afrofuturism, points to a potentially troubling paradox to which it gives rise. Thus, he writes,

“Speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth century technoculture – and, more generally, African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future – might, for want of a better term, be called ‘Afrofuturism.’ The notion of Afrofuturism gives rise to a troubling antinomy: Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of its history, imagine possible futures? Furthermore, isn’t the unreal estate of the future already owned by the technocrats, futurologists, streamliners, and set designers – white to a man – who have engineered our collective fantasies? The “semiotic ghosts” of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Frank R. Paul’s illustrations for Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories, the chromium-skinned, teardrop-shaped household appliances dreamed up by Raymond Loewy and Henry Dreyfuss, Norman Bel Geddes’s Futurama at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, and Disney’s Tomorrowland still haunt the public imagination, in one capitalist, consumerist guise or another.”
(Dery et al, 1994: 180)

In his interview with Dery, Samuel R. Delany, points out that science fiction (SF) was by no means initially a clear choice for African-American readers and writers because of its cultural significance in the United States:

“It was fairly easy to understand why, say, from the fifties through the seventies, the black readership of SF was fairly low – by no means nonexistent. But far lower than it is today. The flashing lights, the dials, and the rest of the imagistic paraphernalia of science fiction functioned as social signs – signs people learned to read very quickly. They signaled technology. And technology was like a placard on the door saying, ‘Boys Club! Girls, keep out. Blacks and Hispanics and the poor in general, go away!’ “
(Delany in Dery et al 1994: 188)

As Ogbunu (2020) points out, when most people think of Afrofuturism today, in the early decades of the 21st century, the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Wakanda comes to mind, an African country that hides advanced technology from the world. Within Wakanda, Afrofuturism, in this case, manifests most explicitly in the award-winning fashion and set design, a hypnotic blend of African traditional art and dress, cyberpunk, and space opera, as discussed by Angela Watercutter (2018).

Afrofuturism’s importance might be seen to transcend the arts and may be described as a political identity or ideology. In that context, it bears some relationship to Afro-pessimism. While Afrofuturism uses science fiction themes to reimagine historic events through futurist frameworks, the focus of Afro-pessimism is on the continued appearance of, and resistance to, forms of racism and slavery in contemporary life (Gaylord, 2018)

References

Dery, M. et al. (1994) Black to the future: interviews with Samuel R Delany, Greg Tate and Tricia Rose, in Dery, M. (ed.) Flame wars: the discourse of cyberculture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 179–222.

Gaylord, Z. G. (2018). Afro-Pessimism And Afrofuturism | NAS. kmuw. Available at https://www.kmuw.org/new-american-songbook/2018-01-29/afro-pessimism-and-afrofuturism-nas [Accessed: 3 July 2022]

Ogbunu, C. B. (2020) How Afrofuturism can help the world mend, Wired, (15 July). Available at: https://www.wired.com/story/how-afrofuturism-can-help-the-world-mend/ [Accessed: 2 July 2022].

Tate (No Date). Afrofuturism. Tate. Available at https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/a/afrofuturism [Accessed: 2 July 2022]

Watercutter, A. (2018) Behind the scenes of Black Panther’s Afrofuturism, Wired, (1 February).

Design: Incomplete Conjectures

RELATED TERMS: Finnegans Wake (and Design); Methodology and Method

Undesigned design: Accumulated graffiti as graphic communication, London

First …

Design as a professional, social practice has historically been divided according to its material outputs, its concrete products, using categories that have become conventional. For example, jewellery design produces items of jewellery, fashion design produces items of clothing and architectural design produces buildings and cities, with each domain incorporating a value hierarchy: there is good design and there is bad design. However, professional design practices have moved far beyond the creation and styling of commodities. They now include such domains as software development, ethnographic research and management consulting (Stern and Siegelbaum, 2019: 268); and even extend to the design of organisational structures and entire societies (Engholm, 2023). This makes design increasingly elastic and difficult to define. Its scope continues to extend because, as Buchanan (2001: 9) notes, “design is an art of invention and disposition, whose scope is universal, in the sense that it may be applied for the creation of any human-made product.”

In seeking to explain the historical development of design practices, Engholm (2023) argues that one could speak of a discipline-specific understanding of design, on the one hand, and a general understanding of design, on the other hand. In the discipline-specific understanding, design is primarily linked to the modern industrial age, with craftsmen employed to create concept designs and product prototypes for industrial mass production. It centres on a materially or artistically based intention to create a given form and is tied to traditional design disciplines, such as industrial design and graphic communication.

In the general or anthropological understanding, designs emerge from human responses, engagements and entanglements with their situations and their surroundings. In this perspective, all forms of tool use as well as projective action, action aimed at bringing something that does not yet exist into concrete, material existence, can be considered design.

Incompletion

USE FOR: Incompleteness

“Abstraction and perfection transport us into the world of ideas, whereas matter, weathering and decay strengthen the experience of time, causality and reality.” (Pallasmaa, 2000: 79)

As noted in the About page, the approach to design taken in this website is guided by an aesthetic that accepts the impermanence, imperfection and incompleteness of the world. As a consequence, designs as part of the world, are conceived as impermanent, imperfect and incomplete. In as far as designs are ‘made’ in order ‘to do’, that is, to act upon people and in the world, what they actually do is not up to the design itself. Designs are open to use and ‘mis’-use, to interpretation and invention. Designs, once launched into the world, continue to act and to reverberate. In that sense, they may be considered to take part in the ongoing montage which is the world. Montage, according to Graver (1995), flaunts the cohesive power of its constructive procedure through its intentional incompleteness.

As highlighted by Damon Taylor (2013: 372) when discussing the Do Add chair, where Jurgen Bey took a functioning chair and sawed off one of its legs, some designs, by their material form or deformation, can bring this incompletion to the surface. Thus, Taylor states,

“In a culture whereby things are presented to us as “complete,” the creation of a radically incomplete object is a refutation of the dominance of the finished commodity; it is a refusal of the socio-technical script of efficiency; it is a frustration of the metascript of the complete and completed commodity and therefore the static entity which is the consumer.”

Such designs, in other words, refuse to engage in the constitution of the complete and perfectly behaved consumer, frustrating their sense of self-possession through possessions (commodities). For Taylor, this constitutes a political act.

Although it is not necessarily a model for design practice, there are similarities between the practice of designing and the writing of James Joyce’s Finnnegans Wake, as discussed by Stephen Heath:

“The writing of Finnegans Wake, however, work in progress (‘wordloosed over seven seas’ (FW2I9.16)), develops according to a fundamental incompletion; the text produces a derisive hesitation of sense, the final revelation of meaning being always for ‘later’.”
(Heath, 1984: 31)

In Joyce’s own words, the principle of incompletion may be expressed in the following way:

“Toborrow and toburrow and tobarrow! That’s our crass, hairy and evergrim life, till one finel howdiedow Bouncer Naster raps on the bell with a bone and his stinkers stank behind him with the sceptre and the hourglass. We may come, touch and go, from atoms and ifs but we’re presurely destined to be odd’s without ends”.
(James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, p.455, lines 12–18).

References

Graver, D. (1995) The Aesthetics of disturbance: anti-art in avant-garde drama. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

Heath, S. (1984) ‘Ambiviolences: notes for reading Joyce’, in Post-structuralist Joyce : Essays from the French. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 31–68.

Pallasmaa, J. (2000). Hapticity and time. Architectural Review, 207 (1239), 78–84.

Hypomnesis, Hypermnesis and Anamnesis

Drivers Wanted. Inscribed Appearances Remain to Recall an Obsolete Service Design and an Obsolete World

Design practices and designed artefacts may be understood in the context of the discussion of hypomnesis, the weakening of memory, and hypermnesis, the strengthening of memory or the making of an unusually poignant and accurate memory of the past. In Platonic language the relation between memory and technics are discussed in terms of anamnesis, hypomnesis and hypomnemata. The term hypomnemata, which derives from Plato, might also be translated as
‘inscriptions’. Hypomnemata may also be thought of as a writing of the self.

As Louis Armand and Arthur Bradley (2006) explain,

“In the Meno and other texts, Plato institutes a now infamous opposition between the Socratic “recollection” of the immortal soul, called ἀνάμνησις (anamnēsis), and the artificial or technical supplement to memory, called ὑπόμνησις (hypomnēsis). It is with this entirely unprecedented opposition that western metaphysics and, arguably, western philosophy more generally, comes into existence. To Plato’s way of thinking, thought is nothing other than the act of the immortal soul remembering itself once again.”

Jacques Derrida, for example, defined James Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake as hypermnesic machines that condense or quote a whole culture. By doing so, these all-encompassing books play dangerously with an unmoored historicism. They also modify our reading habits. As Rabate (2011) notes,

“Reading these texts we discover that we are being read by them, we have been read in advance by the author, traversed by Joyce’s encyclopedic culture. Stephen Dedalus spoke of Shakespeare as the father of his grandfather and his own grandson, presenting him as the paradigm of the self-generating artist.”

The question of hypomnesis is raised by Derrida in Of Grammatology and is developed subsequently by Bernard Stiegler (2006; 2020). Derrida (1976: 91) writes that,

“Now, it is precisely by pointing out, as we shall see, that the pharmakon of writing is good for hypomnesis (re-memoration, recollection, consignation) and not for the mneme (living, knowing memory) that Thamus, in the Phaedrus, condemns it as being of little worth.”

Derrida (1976: 110) continues,

“Whence the pharmakon’s two misdeeds: it dulls the memory, and if it is of any assistance at all, it is not for the mneme but for hypomnesis. Instead of quickening life in the original, “in person,” the pharmakon can at best only restore its monuments. It is a debilitating poison for memory, but a remedy or tonic for its external signs, its symptoms, with everything that this word can connote in Greek: an empirical, contingent, superficial event, generally a fall or collapse, distinguishing itself like an index from whatever it is pointing to.”

Thus, it could be argued analogously, substituting ‘design’ for ‘writing’ in Derrida’s text, that design, a mnemonic means, supplants good memory, spontaneous memory, and therefore signifies forgetfulness because it is a mediation and the departure of the ‘logos’ from itself.

“Writing, a mnemotechnic means, supplanting good memory, spontaneous memory, signifies forgetfulness. It is exactly what Plato said in the Phaedrus, comparing writing to speech as hypomnesis to mnémè, the auxilliary aide-mémoire to the living memory. Forgetfulness because it is a mediation and the departure of the logos from itself. Without writing, the latter would remain in itself. Writing is the dissimulation of the natural, primary, and immediate presence of sense to the soul within the logos.” (Derrida, 1976: 37)

Rather that simply ‘good’ memory or ‘bad’ memory, it may be preferable to acknowledge that there are different kinds of memory, for example, as distinguished by Stiegler (2020): species memory, ethnic memory and artificial memory. Design, initially artificial or artifactual in character, may open to species memory and ethnic memory as an element in the inscribing, encoding and interweaving of embodied, embedded, extended and enactive intelligence(s).

References

Armand, L. and Bradley, A. (eds) (2006) Technicity. Prague: Litteraria Pragensia.

Derrida, J. (1976) Of grammatology. Translated by G. C. Spivak. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Rabate, J.-M. (2011) ‘The Joyce of French Theory’, in Brown, R. (ed.) A Companion to James Joyce. Chichester, West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.

Stiegler, B. (2006) ‘Nanomutations, hypomnemata and grammatisation’, Ars Industrialis. Available at: https://arsindustrialis.org/node/2937 (Accessed: 16 October 2021).

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

Black Mountain College

RELATED TERMS: Bauhaus; Hochschule fur Gestaltung

Black Mountain College was an experimental liberal arts college in Black Mountain, near Asheville, North Carolina. It was founded in 1933 by John Andrew Rice and Theodore Dreier and other former faculty members of Rollins College in Florida. It was “the site of a crucial transatlantic dialogue between European modernist aesthetics and pedagogy and their US counterparts” (Diaz, 2015: 1). The stated holistic aim of its founders was “to educate a student as a person and as a citizen” (Kurtz, 1944). Its heyday was between the mid-1940s and the early 1950s.

Inspired by the work of philosopher John Dewey, who joined the College’s advisory board, it was a seminal site of post-1945 art practices in the United States.

References

Diaz, E. (2015) The experimenters: chance and design at black mountain college. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Kurtz, K. (1944) ‘Black Mountain College, its aims and methods’, Black Mountain College Bulletin, (8). [Reprinted from The Haverford Review, Vol. 3, No. 1, Winter 1944.]

Khora or Chora

RELATED TERMS: Place, Space, Placiality, Spatiality

In philosophy, the term khôra or chora is associated with four main authors: Plato, Heidegger, Derrida and Kristeva. In the context of developing an understanding of design as practice, discipline and material public discourse, that is, as professional, academic and socio-cultural practice at once, khôra or chora is taken to be the place of human creation and participation, of invention, as the in-coming of the other, and of imagination, as the articulation of hodological, Euclidean, Cartesian and topological spacings. Together, these spacings form interiors and exteriors as well as exteriorised interiors and interiorised exteriors with barriers between them which, when breached, through ‘foreign exchange’ bring ‘disease’ and ‘destruction’, terms which are relative to the currents and currency of the system in question.

Wilken (2007), citing Derrida notes that in Greek, khôra or chora means ‘place’ in several different senses. It has been used to refer to place in general, the residence, the habitation, the place where we live, the country. It also has to do with interval; it is what you open to ‘give’ place to things, or when you open something for things to take place.

According to Niall Lucy, for Derrida, taking his lead from Plato, khôra is that third genus between the intelligible and the sensible that makes it possible to think anything like the difference between pure being and pure nothingness, between my autonomous selfhood and your autonomous otherness. It is what makes it possible to think the difference between ‘I’ and ‘you’. Derrida brings to attention the distinction between to situate and to give place, to yield, perhaps

For Plato, khôra is a formless interval. However, rather than being akin to a non-being, khôra is understood here as a being-with, with the dimension of ‘withness’ taken as variable and conditional, not universal.

Alberto Perez-Gomez (1994) takes Plato to be describing the space of human creation and participation, postulating a coincidence between topos (natural place) and chora, yet naming the latter as a distinct reality to be apprehended in the crossing, in the chiasma, of being and becoming. This disclosure is a prerogative of human artefacts. In the particular context of Plato’s tradition, this was the province of poetry and art. In the post-industrial, post-consumerist, Anthropocene age in which we live, this is the province of design and the role of imagination in realising design in practice.

References

Burchill, L. (2011) In-between “spacing” and the “chôra” in Derrida: a pre-originary medium?, in Oosterling, H. and Ziarek, E. P. (eds) lntermedialities: philosophy, arts, politics. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, pp. 27–35.

Derrida, J. (1995) Khora, in Dutoit, T. (ed.), McLeod, I. (trans.) On the name. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 89–127.

Lucy, N. (2004) Khora, in A Derrida Dictionary. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 68-69.

Perez-Gomez, A. (1994) Chora: The Space of architectural representation, in Perez-Gomez, A. and Parcell, S. (eds) Chora: intervals in the philosophy of architecture. Volume 1. Montreal, CA: McGill-Queen’s University Press, pp. 1–34.

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