Design in the Borderlands

Eleni Kalantidou, Tony Fry, Eleni Kalantidou, Tony Fry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415725194
• eBook ISBN: 9781317697831
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

This book makes a significant contribution to advancing post-geographic understandings of physical and virtual boundaries. It brings together the emergent theory of 'border thinking' with innovative thinking on design, and explores the recent discourse on decoloniality and globalism. From a variety of viewpoints, the topics engaged show how design was historically embedded in the structures of colonial imposition, and how it is implicated in more contemporary settings in the extension of 'epistemological colonialism'.

The essays draw on perspectives from diverse geo-cultural and theoretical positions including architecture, design theory and history, sociology, critical theory and cultural studies. The authors are leading and emergent figures in their fields of study and practice, and the geographic scope of the chapters ranges across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, South America, Asia, and the Pacific.

In recognition of the complexity of challenges that are now determining the future security of humanity, Design in the Borderlands aims to contribute to 'thinking futures' by adding to the increasingly significant debate between design, in the context of the history of Western modernity, and decolonial thought.

Acknowledgements

We would like to express our gratitude to all the contributors. They responded to our invitation with interest and energy and their cooperation over the development of this project was truly appreciated. We would also like to thank Alice Aldous, Senior Editorial Assistant at Routledge for her guidance and support. Lastly, a profou nd thank you is in order to Rebecca Barnett, who willingly and untiringly fulfilled our need for a detailed reading of the manuscript, and Andrew Temperly, who provided his time and skills to help us finalise it.

Design in the Borderlands

DOI: 10.4324/9781315778891-1

An introduction

Tony Fry

Eleni Kalantidou

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores the continued pervasiveness of and the interstices and convergences between, Eurocentrism, the rise of the importance of border thinking, the power of design and agency of knowledge. Globalisation, in essence, extends the universalising system of exchange that underpins hegemonic capitalism. Epistemological colonialism can be understood as a certain kind of viral afterlife of a progenitor; it goes on doing the job of colonisation long after the material trappings of its parental host have departed. It concludes with various statements regarding the complexity of the translational fabric of China and points out 'the value of commencing situated opening of 'border thinking' of China that brings design into the picture as a means of understanding the importance of ontological transformation via design'.

Historically the issue of the relations between geography, politics and cultures is as old as the differences within, and between, civilisations themselves. But in our age the geopolitical tensions, nature of the global economy, speed of technological change and the large numbers of people moving between nations are dramatically changing the picture and character of intercultural dynamics. More specifically, inflammatory rhetoric and the acting out of old conflicts within new contexts add to an already complex situation. In light of this, there is a need to more adequately understand that the geopolitics of inter-cultural difference is now taking on a new hue. Moreover, new imperatives are arriving, as often unresolved problems of the past meet emergent ones of the present, with determinate consequences for our collective future. That raises serious questions about the form of the future; rising to the challenges that are now unfolding, and gaining the understanding that meeting them, needs questioning so much that goes unquestioned.

Central to this process of inquiry is asking what form the future should take, recognising that it will be plural, and will provide the means to sustain the web of life in which we are woven. Likewise, attempts to differentiate between what can and cannot be changed are vital to investigate, as are the means of change. Important among them is the agency of design, not as a grand vision of a global project or as a preoccupation with the fetishisation of the form of structure, product or images; rather, framed by the imperatives of our age, design has to be recognised as the decision and direction embodied in all things humans deliberately bring into being, this as they relationally constitute the made environments of our existence. The material forms of design, the designed, are thus means not ends; design is never complete for it never ceases to have consequences, large or small.

In many varied ways the content of the essays in this collection will concretise the conceptual overview of the design just outlined, as it historically infuses the everyday life and instability wrought by colonialism upon the colonised people of the world and, in the contemporary era, as its forms morph into globalism. Design resides in the maelstrom that is ‘now’. In this setting it either serves or counters the forces of the moment (as again the chapters will show). So said, it is worth providing a certain reading of this moment as the geopolitics of inter-cultural difference has been affected by the heritage and violence of globalisation and as other ways of thinking and being have been retained or created. It is in this context that our consideration of ‘border thinking’ will arrive.

To make a view of the moment clear we will use Samuel Huntington’s exposition of the ‘clash of civilisations’ (first voiced in a lecture in 1992, presented in an article in the journal Foreign Affairs in 1993, and then developed into a book published in 1995) as a point of entry. What Samuel Huntington did was to reduce the inter-cultural complexity of contemporary societies to binary global oppositions between his designations of civilisations. The popularised view of such thinking promoted, effectively layered onto largely media-created perceptions of ‘the war on terror’, as it was initially ‘waged’ on al-Qaida through the NATO-supported USA invasion of Afghanistan (an action taken a month after the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York, on 11 September 2001).

Fuelled again by the popular media, as subsequent events in the Middle East have been reported, and in so doing mirroring the problematic rhetoric of Samuel Huntington’s binary, there is now a widespread view that ‘the West’ is locked into an epochal clash with Islam. As Karl Marx pointed out in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, history repeats itself ‘the first time as tragedy, the second as farce’ (Marx 2008, p. 15). Repetition now is of a third order: first there were the Crusades, then came the conflict with the Ottoman Empire and now there is a less clearly defined opposition denoted by the ‘war on terror’ against al-Qaida, the Taliban and radical Jihadists at ‘the sharp end’. What at this moment in time arrives is history as a farcical tragedy. Conflict begets dispersed conflict, misunderstanding begets increased misunderstanding and tragedy begets more tragic tragedy.

One of the results of this miasma is a reinforcement of an already deeply embedded Eurocentric worldview and a hardening of anti-Western sentiments among many peaceful Muslims. Faced with this situation, and its indivisible placement in the larger frame of the history and futural consequences of Western colonialism, there is an increasing need for other ways of thinking, other discourses, spaces, modes of enunciation and ways of acting. These all have to be, and are starting to be, created. But for this to happen it is essential that intellectual borders are crossed and disciplinary hierarchies are dismembered. It is the ambition of the essays in this collection to contribute to this end.

Globality, Eurocentrism, colonialism, epistemology

What is becoming increasingly clear from critiques that have been developing over the past few years is that all post-colonialism represented was a withdrawal of the discernable apparatus of colonial power. It did not mean an end of colonialism. Rather its consequences have continued by two mechanisms, both of which were grounded in Western modernity and extended the reach of Eurocentric power in certain ways while reducing its immediate visibility. One of these was the fake reformism and pseudo-humanitarianism of ‘Globalisation’; the other was the agency of knowledge, as inscribed into the functionality of the everyday habitus, and the subjects that occupy it, as characterised by the concept of ‘epistemological colonialism’.

Globalisation, in essence, extends the universalising system of exchange that underpins hegemonic capitalism. As such it shares the same totalising ambition of modernity, but without the idealism. No matter what claims are made the intent is simply ‘big capitalism’. It is literally a monstrous project of total economic colonisation. This means it negates local economic knowledge, practices and values. But at the same time it appropriates anything and everything deemed to be able to be revalorised within the remit of its own economic regime. Nothing that can be exchanged exists beyond the reach of the means of commodification. An economic metabolic machine is introduced to facilitate the sating of this hunger for growth. Anything of economic value has its value enhanced, a local economic infrastructure (from financial systems to supply chains) is put in place; the desires for, and values of, global commodity culture arrive as the means to gain entry into modernised reality.

Indivisibly and ineludibly the base values of this desired culture were, and are, transported into ontologically designing environments (government departments, educational institutions, businesses) from which a particular modern society, and its subjects, classes, civil structures and ways of life, were to become projected. Successively, this projection of commodity culture, as work and its rewards, has been deeply implicated in the rapid urbanisation of a huge numbers of cities in non-Western nations. And the impetus this process created has generated a huge human urban overspill that has lead to the ‘self-building’ of informal settlement on an enormous scale.

In this context, claims made on the advances brought by globalisation are either wrong or contestable. Less debatable is what it destroys, which is essentially the counter-developmental potentiality of what is already present in the local (be they creative and craft practices, knowledge, farming and horticultural skills). With care and selectivity, what the development of the local can do is to provide a counter direction and discourse to the extension of unsustainability that globalisation always brings. Rather than seeing this as a contest between the old and new, it begs to be viewed as the global new versus the local new within the setting of the global. Such thinking fully acknowledges that, in the face of the constant forward march of the unsustainable, all of humanity has to have its life conditions improved. The implication of these remarks is that ‘aid’ is an exchange, a mutual learning and twoway traffic. What this means is that an enhancement of the material conditions of some is vital (the development of a counter development) enabled by a diminishment of excess of others (a development to counter development).

Poverty and excess are both defuturing faces of unsustainability that the illogicality of ‘capital logic’ is unable to comprehend, for this ‘logic’ was constituted prior to the recognition that everything that the extant economy creates, rests upon destruction. This has only become apparent to those who care to look. What can be seen is that the scale of the global population and the level of economic growth reached a point when the rate of destruction started to exceed resource creation and renewal (Thomas Malthus is proving to be more right than wrong). Put another way, all bio-cybernetic systems have a capacity to absorb and recover from damage (read as a metaphor for pre-industrial society) but once damage goes beyond a certain point they result in complete breakdown (read as a metaphor for the unsustainable nature of industrial and post-industrial society).

Following on: what the vast literature on globalisation lacks is precisely thinking about this reversal, which, rather than connoting a return to the idealism of ‘small is beautiful’ on a global scale, actually asserts ‘there is no future (for “us”) without sustainment’. Thus, for globalisation read globalised defuturing, which is to say that once the rate of destruction exceeds the rate of renewal our (species) time is taken away, reduced. Once this is understood the very nature of the debate on ‘our’ mode of earthly habitation needs to change.

Epistemological colonialism can be understood as a certain kind of viral afterlife of a progenitor; it goes on doing the job of colonisation long after the material trappings of its parental host have departed. As such it continues to extend key features of the values, mode of thought and worldview constituted as the colonised mind. Even after the global structures of a Eurocentric world order had fallen, even after the geopolitical power of former Western colonial power has dissolved, the colonisation of mind continued to be extended, least evident in the endless erasure of local and indigenous sensibilities and knowledge. This is a process, a hollowing out of culture that happens over time and across generations. To speak of it is so often to invite indignation. Certainly globalisation presents a certain kind of culture, but it is culture as image, as an empty shell and evacuated memory. At the same time it is important to acknowledge that such a fractured form of culture is created, exists and becomes ‘occupied subjectivities’.

What has been, and will be made clear in various ways by many of the chapters, is that the need for decoloniality continues; it is an unfinished business, and in a world of dispersed communities, that is no longer identifiable in easily designated geographic space.

Turning to design

Moving from the historical to the futural provides the opening into which design can arrive and can be seen to be a determinate force of global change. This is providing that design itself is remade. Key to this remaking is breaking from the impositional worldly enframing based on an assemblage of the modern (the unification of all and everything designed by the materiality of modern ideology), followed by a turning to a mode of ontological design that is able to redirect, repair and remake the often aesthetically concealed damage of modernity.

An important key and celebrated mantra of design practice is that it is a ‘problem-solving activity’, whereas in so many ways the designed has been problem-creating. One of the main reasons for this is that designers mostly commence their task under the direction of a client brief in which the major design decisions have already been made. Thereafter, designers mostly solve ‘how to’ second-order problems, to realise and deliver the client’s requirement. In doing this, it so often creates a problem that the client’s intent never recognised, or even knew existed. The counter-practice now becomes ‘design as a problem-defining activity’. This obviously implies another way of thinking in which an awareness of Eurocentrism, border thinking, structures of epistemological colonisation and an understanding of defuturing can arrive to significantly contribute to the revelation of the actual fundamental problems to be solved.

Other ways of thinking design bring with them another mode of reading the designed. To take an obvious and pertinent example: design was deeply embedded in the structures of colonial imposition. The colonial city, for example, was not merely an expressive form of colonial power but equally it was an operational system of order, as was introduced agriculture and the industrialised workplace. The ordering of space and time in turn were elemental to the designing of new (colonised) ontologies predicated upon (by degree) the erasure of those that were extant. This process continues but, as indicated, it has shifted from mechanisms of overt performative impositi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Table Of Contents
• Design in the Borderlands
• Acknowledgements
• Index