Politics, the political and design
Tony Fry and Anne Marie Willis
Politics is an institutionalised activity which is supposed to be based upon contestation between political ideologies. But in this age of hegemonic capitalism, difference is now a matter of posture and rhetoric rather than of fundamental social, cultural and economic values. In the West, politics has become the administration of the status quo, with democracy being reduced to the operation of the ‘free market’ directed by corporate interests.
The response to ‘climate change’ is a good example of the stasis of institutional politics. The priority is ensuring that action taken to address the problem does not seriously harm the economic status quo (rather than being the basis of rethinking the nature of economic exchange). The favoured approach of political and corporate actors is for schemes like carbon trading, likely to produce minor (at best) environmental results and certainly likely to deliver significant economic benefits for its financial managers.
The political, on the other hand, is broader and grounded in the actual fabric of the everyday life of every segment of society. All that shapes the form of everyday life is ideological in an essential sense. Every materialised and immaterialised form of the culture and economy in which we live is ideologically charged — all these forms are individually and collectively directional.
Trying to grasp the complexity of ideology was, in fact, one of the major intellectual projects of sociology and cultural theory in the 1970s and early 80s. In attempting to do this, the boundaries became constantly expanded — via language, discourse, text, culture — until there was nothing but ideology. In reaction to this, ‘the ideological’ came to be understood as grounded in practice rather than something that could be articulated as a universal theory — this is to say that ideology came to be seen as a situated specificity rather than as a general category. Ideology henceforth was addressed as specific to a particular discourse (e.g., politics, sexuality, race, class, medicine, the law, etc). Lamentably, things have now turned full circle and the term ‘ideology’ is now employed in ways that evidence the forgetting of this critical history of earlier decades.
The overt political ideologies that underpin the societies in which we live have had a long passage through modernity, via the Enlightenment, to the present. You can trace the philosophical foundations upon which contemporary ideas of freedom, individualism, civil society, the law, justice, parliamentary democracy and the market economy all stand. Every one of these aspects of modern life evolved institutionally and materially, in subjective and objective forms — they became the very ‘things’ that constituted the form and operation of the social and economic fabric that we take to be the reality in which we exist.
Design, mostly, is a service industry, serving the status quo. It serves to replicate the given reality of our existence in which a ‘politics of the same’ — the only formal politics we have — is enacted. Obviously, this doesn’t happen in consciously overt ways, but rather through the inherent ontologically designing nature of design’s politically unexamined practices and the directional consequences of all that design brings into being. Or, put another way, ‘everything we design goes on designing’. What we are saying here then is that this designing is ever ideological, and this understanding of design, i.e., revealing the designed as continual process rather than just as realised product, is ever political.
It follows that if we want another kind of future than the one offered by the unsustainable status quo, then we all have to change direction, redirect our practices and all that they bring into being — this so we may become another way. Such change can only happen if design is not just acknowledged as political but also becomes politically engaged as an ethically redirective domain of human endeavour.
We cannot go back. While the overt political ideologies of the past have good and bad lessons to teach, they lack the conceptual and intellectual means to deliver sustainable futures. Likewise, democracy as we now know it — as just another marketed commodity choice based upon appeals to self interest rather than the collective good — is not going to deliver such futures. The massive changes needed to secure sustainable futures — such as major reductions in the negative impacts of economic activity, limits on resource utilisation and the initiation of socially just levels of equity — are not the kind of things that politicians are going to put in front of voters.
While new political theory needs to be created, it could be a long time coming and even longer gaining hegemonic status. We cannot wait for neo-enlightened political leadership. We have to act now. We have to embrace design “as a politically engaged, ethically redirective domain of human endeavour”. Rather than designing more things, be they ‘sustainable,’ the activity of designing, of designers and the designed all have to serve a great deal more than the status quo. How to investigate, think, explore, discuss and create this is exactly why DPPolitics exists.
We do not have all the answers, but we do have a clear starting point — making as many people as we can, in as many practices as possible, begin to recognise just how important design is and thereafter starting to act on this insight.
To paraphrase Pericles: Just because you do not take an interest in design doesn’t mean design won’t take an interest in you.
Comment by Jason — August 6, 2007 @ 8:40 pm
First, your seeming inability to accept markets as an essential act of human social intercourse dangerously clouds your thinking. That markets are corruptible does not make them more evil than any other human practice. Indeed, your implied desire to restrict individual participation in such a practice betrays a utopian urge that invariably does lead to evil.
Second, design is the act of a designer, but building is the act of a client - the one who pays.
this key actor in the production of architecture is not mentioned in your manifesto, suggesting a delusion of efficacy on the part of the designer as actor in an idoelogical struggle that is not born out in quotidien existence.
Comment by Michael Ytterberg — August 21, 2007 @ 4:45 pm
Reply to Michael Ytterberg from Anne-Marie Willis:
Thanks for your comment and apologies for long delay in its appearance here - teething troubles meant comments were not arriving for moderation, and have only just been discovered.
First, while we are critical of the reduction of politics to the marketplace, we are not idealistically, trying to ‘wish away’ the marketplace. What we are suggesting however is that institutional politics urgently needs to transcend the ‘give the consumer what they want, no matter what damage this does to the common good’ logic to which it has descended. Second, markets do not act without restraint – freedom is always ‘freedom under the law’and the nature of constraints on the market place is the stuff of the political. We would argue that the imperative for sustainment should become the basis of constraint.
On design – clearly our editorial comments are brief and cannot encompass all we have written on design and architecture. In fact, we recognise that the relationship between clients and designers (including architects) can present opportunities for change-towards-sustainment under the rubric of ‘redirective practice’ – see Tony Fry’s article ‘Contingency Design’ in this issue on this; also see his ‘Redirective practice: an elaboration’, Design Philosophy Papers, 1/2007 http://www.desphilosophy.com/dpp/dpp_journal/cited_papers/paper1_FryRedirect/dpp_paper1.html .
Comment by Anne-Marie Willis — November 22, 2007 @ 9:32 pm
Last week, I attended a lecture at Pratt Institute by Ed Mazria, founder of Architecture 2030, http://www.architecture2030.org/ and it was a packed lecture hall. Which in itself was encouraging - American students are interested in sustainable design. However, his reactions to climate change and what to do about it were telling of how the issues are played out in the US - firstly & most importantly, he argued, we need to stop coal plants; and secondly, we need to design our way out of the looming crisis, given the building industry and buildings in general are such big polluters. On the first issue, 2030 started a campaign this year in newspapers and magazines to try to stop the production of another 150 NEW coal plants currently planned for the US. They have about $200 000 (or whatever small figure) for their campaign. Meanwhile, the coal industry has responded with a $4 million advertising campaign warning people their lights will go out if these new coal plants aren’t built, and they’re “clean” coal plants anyway.
Interestingly Americans seem to have given up on institutional politics as a means of changing anything. There is so much talk about democracy here but then only 30 or 40% of Americans bother to take up the responsibility to be a citizen and actually vote. So nobody ever mentions the role of government in sustainability debates (although Manzria pointed out some local city governments had taken up his green building code, but only for state buildings, of course, you can’t stand in the way of business).
So we move on to option two, “educate the consumers” and then architects can help save the world by designing smarter buildings. I found it all rather round about and a little depressing. My students tend to be the same - it’s as if your only existence in this culture is as a consumer and your sole responsibility is to yourself - they find it very hard to get out of that mode of thinking - as one student said, once you start legislating codes, implimenting restraints on the marketplace and telling people what to do, you’re on the slippery slope to the gulags… Ultimately, someone needs to stand up and say the American “way of life” as it is currently understood (as excessive consumerism) IS the problem and this culture needs a fundamental change of direction. But of course no one wants to say that, particularly in the political realm because ultimately, no one wants to hear it…
Comment by Dan Huppatz — December 8, 2007 @ 8:21 am
As one that has only just stumbled across this site I would like to thank those responsible for its existence. As many notable scholars have suggested, the relationship between politics and design has been the foundation of capitalisms own project of self-innovation and therefore the single most significant influence on the state of our becoming and being over the past century and a half. However for the purposes of this lay critique, and at the risk of over extending my knowledge, it seems that in order for Capitalism to succeed it must seduce and exploit the one characteristic which could be said to be an irreducible dimension of our being, one that serves to spatialise time through the subsequent annihilation of it. That characteristic is consumption. In my humble opinion, I think the debate should concern the shift in the importance of consumption and its role in the building of political capital. Jean Baudrillard provides a fascinating framework with which to examine the role of design and its object in the building of political capital. The idea that the city as object mediates between the city’s brand, which is ultimately the thing consumed, and the subject (consumer), may interestingly enough also serve as the basis to the productive strategy of a city which sees capitalization, and therefore creative destruction or innovation, engage the recycling of the connotative value of objects and therefore its immaterial state rather than the recycling of its denotative value and therefore its material state. As Baudrillard asserts, the object (whether building, people or event) is simply an effect of the logic of the sign (whether architecture, ethic, or spectacle), projected by it.
Comment by Ingo Kumic — February 5, 2008 @ 12:02 am