Defuturing

A New Design Philosophy

Tony Fry

• Editorial: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350089549
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Design
• Categoría: Design General

"Once one understands the nature and magnitude of defuturing as the negation of world futures, how one has to account for the history and making of the material world – including design - dramatically changes. Defuturing as our condition forces the generation of a new philosophy of design." With these thoughts this book presents a radically new understanding of the history, context and futures of designing. First published in 1999, now reissued with a new preface by the author, Defuturing: A New Design Philosophy is a prescient and powerful account of what it means to comprehend that we live in world that is taking away futures for ourselves and non-human others. Arguing that designing is doubly implicated in this process, first in its roles in helping to create the unsustainable, but second, re-thought through the lens of defuturing, as a mode of acting in the world that can help contest the negation of the world, Defuturing transforms our comprehension of designing and of how futures can be constituted. Working not through abstract theorizing but through the analysis of concrete examples, the book uses historical material on design to expose the archaeology of defuturing. Shattering the illusion that the future simply "is", Defuturing confronts designing with the challenge of remaking while offering the elements of a new practical reasoning of design acting.

PART I

An opening

Image 2 Eiffel Tower detail (© Tony Fry).

We all live with our own seeing, hearing, feeling and thinking that to us seems individual, natural and owned. We know we come from a culture, have been shaped by our education and differ in our interests. We realize the world we occupy has problems, but nevertheless are at home in this world – it is familiar. What is strange is ‘elsewhere’. The story of the defutured upsets these sets of assumptions: it exposes so many of our self- and world-formations as deformations; it tells us that much of what we believe to be supporting us is in fact undercutting our being as beings; and it reveals that the unfamiliar is not elsewhere but within and everywhere around us.

So often we look for obvious differences, when the dramatic change often arrives by small inflection. In the main, defuturing is about reading these inflections of the familiar. However, this reading opens onto an entirely new way of understanding the worlds that humans have made, and what humans do; hence, its link to the new philosophy. We are in many ways surrounded by a hostile environment of our own making, but in which we feel safe. In the epoch of our present existence (which is in fact a plural moment), and in order to take care of ourselves and the things we need and value, we, as a diverse species, need to change direction: to continue to be, ‘our’ being-in-the-world has to become other than it is. For the few, this means a new thinking and a remaking (mostly of meaning, partly of matter); for the many, as ever, it means living the change with what has been changed.

The argument of the chapter that makes up the first part of this text illustrates much of what has just been said, by denaturalizing how we think about technology, and war. In doing so, it will expose the fact of our living in the midst of much which defutures. This telling also starts to demonstrate that defuturing can be a thinking in practice towards change. More theoretically, it can be the very basis of a non-instrumental, but materially positive, application of a deconstructive strategy. As a mode of inquiry, defuturing is a crucial tool to turn the acceptedness of unrecognized, but omnipresent, unsustainability into a foundation to make things otherwise. In a world of constant change, obsessed with change and ever-creating images and rhetoric promoting change, the encounter with the defutured tells us what should and should not change, where responsibility rests and what it means to confront the imperatives upon which a future with a future might mean.

1 Technology, warring and the crisis of history

Image 3 Nanjing Arsenal, China, 1870s (Fry collection).

This chapter aims to inform a way of reading the defutured that forces it to disclose itself. To assist in this task, the most available form of that which defutures, which is war, will be employed, but only after a critical relation to technology has been established. The fundamental proposition is that war, in its familiar and unfamiliar manifestations, is deeply embedded in world unmaking – ‘deworlding’. As this, war is confronted as both the designed and a designing.

Design, as indicated already, is not just a way of talking about one organizational activity, the prefiguring of objects or the directing of aesthetics. Rather, taking the wider view of Design, it is one of the most powerful ways to understand how a world is prefigured, made and acts. Yet neither society at large, the intellectual community, nor ‘the design world’ seem to recognize this. There is in fact a general failure to understand the complexity which is Design, and the extent to which Design is implicated in forming the ground of the unsustainable, all of which thereby acts to advance the defutured. Also unrecognized is the impossibility of sustain-ability without a fundamental reconstruction of design theory, thinking and practice.

To be able to read the relation between the defutured and Design requires not so much a method, but a sensibility, or better still an attunement to the discovery of a diversity of signs of destruction. By looking at and learning from war, as a techno-ontological domain, the intention is to inform a nascent ‘literacy’ that can be brought to the reading of defuturing in general. Our encounter is not a characterization of war as just a violent historical event. War is viewed as being more fundamentally within a vectorial designing of forces that exceeds any possibility of bounded event. The resonances of war – ‘warring’ – will be shown to be both a product and a generative force of design and technology. So while the immediate hostilities and overt signs of war may be spatially and temporally contained, the flow of design, technology and pain in and out of warring cannot be.

War is a primary agent that defutures, not just through its obviously quantifiable damage to life, limb and material environments but also more substantially (if less dramatically) as it creates ‘closure’ of potentialities, including the potentialities of what design and technology might have been.

Technology in flux

Technology is ever changing and never able to be adequately identified reductively. While technology is addressed here, it will invite continual comment throughout the text. While Design gets named from time to time, its presence should be understood as structurally omnipresent: technology arrives by design, is applied by design and, in its form and use, technology itself designs. It follows that in the historicity of modern worlds, technology importantly exposes the phenomenology of Design (and vice versa) as the intentionality of an act, the intention of what the act produces and the experience of a product in action.

A consideration of technology generates a whole range of issues. There are, however, four which will especially concern us. The first issue is to re-emphasize that technology is not a fixed phenomena – it ever changes and it is ever generative of change, this in constantly proliferating material and immaterial forms. The second is to acknowledge that the division between it, us and our environments is no longer easy to make (we exist as much in it, as with it). The third issue is a qualification of the second in so far as divisions between technology, knowledge and culture become increasingly hard to identify. Issue four simply asserts the long and established relation between design, technology and war. While these four issues are all profoundly implicated in the defutured (as we will show in this and other chapters), what we immediately want to draw attention to is the complexity of our ‘proximity’ to that complexity we name technology.

Technology is present for us in a number of ways. It has an existence, it has being, as ‘a thing’, an object and process, which is not to say it can just be reduced to material substance. This means that no matter what the technology is, that it has ontological status and agency. Next (and leaving the question of the use of tools by animals for future consideration), all technology, both in order to come into being and for use, requires knowledge, and new technology frequently becomes knowledge (software). On this latter point, a claim can be made that any, and all, technology gains an epistemological status. Finally, technology becomes environment. It becomes a place of dwelling, in some instances one of absolute dependence (like for the pilot of an aircraft).

Being able to make such distinctions about technology does not mean the question of proximity to it is solved. To recognize we have a proximity to something is not the same as knowing what it is we are near. Although we are able to make and use technologies, this does not mean we fundamentally understand their agency (not least because we understand so little about the designing of productivism).

Dwelling as we do inside technology, one has to work within the movement of the machinery of technology’s heterogeneous parts. This requires appropriating and assembling as one’s conjuncture, needs, desires and demands change. Quite simply, there is no position available for an over-reading of technology that is outside technology’s reach. It is just not possible to step outside its design. The key issue of proximity then is one of no critical distance, no gap and potentially induced alienation.

In one direction, technology appears to have been developed by man (which in this case perhaps almost totally equates with men) as an instrument to make ‘a world’. However, as this making evolved, the technological remaking of ‘the world’ by technology, including the remaking of technology itself, has become more evident. Historically, technology has been dominantly projected as a human-directed tool, created to tame, exploit or re-fashion ‘nature’. What is now becoming clearer is that it also acts to reshape its maker and user as much as, and perhaps more than that which it is presented as making. Moreover, in the present manufactured environment of human and inhuman technological dwelling, a point has been reached whereby technology constitutes its own designing ground of auto-creation. Technology, de facto, has taken on a life of its own, a development of itself that brings into question the basic assumption that a division exists between technology and ‘life’, the ‘organic’ and the ‘inorganic’. Exactly if, where, when and how such a change occurred is clearly not self-evident. Conspiratorially, our being and technology seem to evoke ea ch other.

One indistinct moment can be identified as profoundly redefining the relation of what is usually deemed the animate and the inanimate. This was when technology fused with information, and in so doing connected itself to the cognitive core of culture. This fusion arrived long before ‘information technology’ was invented or named as a technological domain. This indistinct moment was a moment of absolute transformation in two ways. First, the coming of the tool re-designed pre-human being: it was the agency of a pre-human becoming human. (Here ‘the tool’ is cast as the means by which animal passed to animal laborans and then to homo faber.) The second transformation was the tearing, the cut, and the creation of the abyss wrought by the coming of the tool as it effected an instrumental division from, and thereafter an eternal mediation of, the environment. (The coming of the tool was thus the coming of the world, its first reified making.)

The first cut of the tool totally transformed the existent being-of-being and the being-here (dasein) of being. Quite simply the fundamental nature of dwelling changed. To talk of a moment in this context is to evoke an unplaceable but temporally extended time (definable as the sum of a continually repeating moment over a protracted period of time, and across a dispersal of spaces of difference). The crucial focus here is phenomenological rather than archaeological change, the facticity of which is ‘being-present-now’ rather than the representational claim of artefactual evidence.

‘Worlds’ were created by the tool’s turning of ‘the world’ into a standing reserve for making, and then by learning from the feedback from the tool. The sound of stone against stone, the feel of the strike made, the look of the material after being struck and opened up, broke the hermeneutic limit of hunting with, and for, whatever was to hand. Suddenly the interpretative space of being-in-the-world was expanded, and with every expansion, the informational ecology grew. (It was the knowledge-designing of this ecology that divided ‘human’ from a tool-using animal.) Thus, the indistinct moment of absolute transformation of the animal arrived not just because tools were materially transformative but because they expanded and changed the ‘world of information’, how information was acquired and the conditions, content and application of directly engaged empirical learning. With the coming of the tool, the die was cast for direct empirical observation having to give way to a ‘truth’ not just mediated by technical mechanisms but created by them. That science failed to reflect upon the designing of its instruments of mediation meant that realist knowledge was taken as if it were empirical.

What has just been characterized is that human life is itself not only mediated by technology but also implicated in ontological circling. This fact, which is but another expression of the designed designing, will constantly return, for the moment it is perhaps· illustrating the point more simply.

Data from measured lifespans, recorded body height, weight and age, the health of our bodies as gauged by testing the composition of blood and urine, strength testing and the measurement of intelligence by IQ testing – these are but a fraction of the constructs that designs data that locks us into designing ourselves by the designing of the ‘things’ that deliver or respond to this data. Food, clothes, sports equipment and transport are just a few of the reactive, and then directive, ‘mechanisms’ of the metaphysics of our ontological designing. Thus, the mediated knowledge from feedback information ‘throws us into things’. Without us realizing it, the measured has become unbounded. Equally, the conceptual and technical means to measure, as well as the knowledge of the measured and the ‘fact’ of the measured, have become inseparable.

Modern economies, be it on the back of anthropocentric and productivist thought, have manufactured ‘reality’ as a technologically registered outcome. The ‘proof’ of this ‘reality’ is delivered by the compound knowledge of science – knowledge which, as indicated, is itself depended upon the ‘true’ data arriving via technological instruments and methods of measurement. More than this, and by the greatest possible conceit of reason, science, in the name of particle and astrophysics, claims that the creation of everything (the cosmos and God, as force) is knowable. At the extreme, with a massive dose of myopic metaphysics and vast amounts of research finding, science set itself the challenge of finding a way to be able to eventually measure and ‘prove’ the mechanism of the origin of the universe.

Over the course of the Enlightenment ‘the world’ was brought into being as an abstracted object of view – this via theory and practice that produced the quantification of space, the measured grid, the map, the power of what the lens exposed and the authority of the picture. Through the development of these means, there accrued a massive agency of calculation, and its representational forms. These forms put into place those knowledges that established perceptions of the real and truth. But more than this, they also underpinned the proliferation of applied knowledges of world-making (and unmaking) that profoundly altered the relation between metap...