Designs On Us: Some Basic Contentions on the Politics of Design

The following contentions are offered up by way of a summary and a conclusion for the community of my graduate seminar "Design for Living," which took place in the Spring term of 2009 at the San Francisco Art Institute. Each contention summarizes a recurring theme or problematic or author that especially preoccupied our attention over the course of the term.

We find ourselves in a world we make, and find that we are made and unmade in the making of it. What are we to make of the abiding artifice, the polis, that sustains "the political"? What are we doing when we are doing design and what do we do when we discern that design has designs on us?

Here we will think about design as a site through which politics are done, but typically done by way of the gesture of a circumvention of the political. At the heart of this disavowed doing of politics we will contend with a perverse conjuration of "the future." The Good Life for biopolitical moderns contending in the world in the aftermath of "The Social Question" is a life with a future, and it is to "the future" that design devotes its politicity. The human species, that fantastic figure of the humanist imaginary, that Good Life that pretends to be Just Life, that universality that never arrives and always excludes, has a future, too, and its City is the one that demands design most of all.

We will direct our attention to the reiterated gesture of a futurological de-politicization of political aspiration through the figure of design, especially as this gesture articulates three urgent contemporary design discourses: First, a design discourse that would achieve sustainability (and ultimately secure social justice) through Green design; a Second design discourse that would deepen democracy through social software coding; and a Third design discourse that would achieve human equity (and ultimately a parochial vision of "optimality" misconstrued as liberation) through a eugenic policing of lifeway diversity.

In summary, we will note the regularity with which [1] the typically de-politicizing gesture of design tends to underwrite actually conservative endorsements of the status quo and the politics of incumbency; [2] any embrace of the typically unilateral implementation of design tends to underwrite anti-democratic circumventions of stakeholder politics among an ineradicable diversity of peers with whom we share the world; [3] identification in the present with "the futures" typical of design tends to be purchased at the cost of a reactionary dis-identification with the diversity of one's peers and the open futurity of politics arising out of that diversity in the present; [4] typically, the rhetorical motor of design's futurisms tends to involve a divestment of freedom of its lived worldly substance through a reductive instrumentalization then compensated for by authoritarian wish-fulfillment fantasies of hyperbolically amplified instrumental powers misconstrued as freedom and sold, incoherently, as earthly deification.

We have proceeded first of all under the simple assumption that design practices are always also political practices as well. This isn't a particularly controversial notion, since it is easy to show that design decisions are often driven by assumptions, values, problems that are conventionally understood as political, just as it is easy to show that design decisions inevitably have political impacts, directing resources, policing conduct, circumscribing our palpable sense of the possible and the important, and so on. Our next assumption was also straightforward, but somewhat more controversial: While it is easy to see that design both arises out of political assumptions and has manifold political impacts, we asserted as well that design typically does its political work in a mode of disavowal. The quintessential gesture of design, we said, is that of a circumvention of the political altogether, and the foregrounding of what it poses as technical questions instead.

Technical questions, questions directing themselves to instrumental prediction and control, differ from properly political ones -- among other reasons -- in that technical questions are those for which a consensus as to best means and ends either already exists or is always imagined to be achievable (provoking the aspiration for that achievement), whereas political questions are those which always attest and respond to an ineradicable diversity of stakeholders -- and thereby arise out of a diversity of judgments, desires, problems, capacities, situations -- a diversity that is interminably reconciled, always only imperfectly and contingently, all the while collaborating, contesting, and testifying in concert to that diversity. One way to get at the difference in play here is to recall that science (the quintessential technical or instrumental discourse, since it strives to substitute publicly-testable efficacy for priestly authority) aims at a valid consensus and indeed manages, if only provisionally to achieve it, whereas democratic politics (the quintessential political discourse, since it strives to substitute publicly-legible consent for elite rule) aims at a flourishing dissensus.

The word design comes from the Latin designare, which is to mark out or devise, that is to say, de- "out" conjoined to signare "to mark," derived in turn from signum, "mark" or "sign." Palpable here is the kinship of the word design with the word designate, to name or specify. Also palpable is the connection of design to the primordial cultural technology of writing, as a "marking out." Thinking both naming (designation) and making (design) through the figurative conjuration of a scene of "marking out" is richly evocative: For one thing, a clarifying (and prejudicial) association is made here between the unilateral experience of the staking out on the ground of a layout and the eventual building that arises out of this foundational marking, and a still more foundational transaction (no less unilateral) through which an abstract ideal or plan or eidos arising first in imagination is thereupon implemented in material reality. To be sure, there are other associations in play here as well in this figurative working through of a design akin to designation: To name a thing is by some reckonings to "master" it, as in the primal Adamic scene recapitulated in so much magickal as well as scientific discourse, but by others it is to circumscribe its connotations both to its cost and our own, whatever the benefits that also eventuate from it. Naming certainly has its politics, too, as we shall see especially when the politics of designating just which lives are really lives at all becomes the focus of design.