[-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 118, Issue 1

[Adam Nocek]

Hi all,

Thanks, Ross, Adrian, and others for your great comments. I'm particularly
encouraged and intrigued by Adrian's hope that we may be able to subvert
neoliberalism via design in the "public interest," and so on. I also want
to draw attention to John's comments:

...but for the practices to be actualized we should suspend remote
conversations that are mediated by a massive global telecommunications
infrastructure that is fully dependent on hydrocarbons. (We are the
neo-liberals here communicating via this technology)


As I sit here writing and utterly dependent on hydrocarbons, I'm reminded
of how interdependent practices and materials are in our neoliberalization
of all last vestiges of a design future, and how their configuration will
have to change, drastically, if we are indeed going to design _for_ a
Future (which is what John's point is, I think). In this regard, I can't
help but think of Jeanne van Heeswijk's work I saw this summer in
Rotterdam  (
http://www.jeanneworks.net/projects/freehouse_-_radicalizing_the_local/#/jeanneworks/);
her project Freehouse reconceptualizes the very terms of "design," altering
its methods and materials, by designing social spaces for civil
disobedience, which empower "communities to become their own antidote."

In any case, I'm curious about the extent to which design
practices/materials need to become uncertain, or even unrecognizable, to
themselves in order to generate the design space that Adrian has in mind.
In the context of scientific practice, which has seen its share of
commodification in the last decades, Isabelle Stengers draws on A. N.
Whitehead's call for "uncertainty" in the face of scientific "minds in a
groove."  In today's era of "fast science" that has locked in our future
for us, "slow science" is a way to reclaim uncertain futures, by not
reducing the world's messiness to what can be fixed. We cannot ignore
messiness, she claims, by dreaming up or fantasizing about how to correct
it; we have to learn to live with messiness, and  learn from it. We have to
become apprentices to mess even. This is what "slow science" asks of
scientists. I guess I'm wondering whether we can make a similar appeal to
"slow design," and what that would look like. How would learning to design
_with_ mess-- instead of  trying to fix it-- reconfigure the
practices/materials that have stolen uncertain futures from us?

Just some thoughts...

Thanks!

On Wed, Sep 10, 2014 at 3:04 PM, John Hopkins <jhopkins at neoscenes.net>
wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>
>  But is not lost. I am intrigued and inspired by design practices that
>> attempt
>> to subvert the logic of neoliberalism. Design in the public interest,
>> structures for inclusion, practices of commoning, and so forth are all
>> exciting experiments with a more expanded understanding of the social
>> basis
>> of design as a constitutive power (to borrow from Hardt and Negri).
>>
>
> Problem is, 99.999% of 'design practices' (as a cultural-social-academic-economic
> 'manifestation') are enclosed by a complete dependence on the wider
> hydrocarbon energy system -- precisely because those practices grew out of
> and exist because of the excess that contemporary (technological) energy
> sources have (temporarily and unsustainably!) produced...
>
> And, actually, we *will* eventually consume our way out of the
> environmental 'problem' -- when the energy source is all consumed, then
> there will be a massive re-set of the system. When the sustainable pre/post
> hydrocarbon population settles down to somewhere between, say, 0.5 and 1.0
> billion of the human species, the environment will slowly re-evolve into
> something entirely different. (This scenario seems to be the most likely,
> as there is *no* slowing of consumption apparent on the wide scale...!) In
> some ways, it is a standard that it an anathema to Life (as a phenomena) to
> *not* consume when there is an available energy source. Humans try to think
> themselves out of this need for Life to consume energy to project itself
> into the future. But it would appear that the conscious thoughts aren't
> enough to change the actions that are a core part of evolved life.
>
> So, bravo for thinking about the practices, but for the practices to be
> actualized we should suspend remote conversations that are mediated by a
> massive global telecommunications infrastructure that is fully dependent on
> hydrocarbons. (We are the neo-liberals here communicating via this
> technology). Didn't Graham Harwood, or someone else of that ilk make a
> calculation as to how much energy is expended in sending an email?
>
> A few cents of afternoon meditation after having to walk home with a flat
> tire on my bike through sonic clouds of screeching cicadas. They will be
> around longer than we shall, neoloberalism or not!
>
> Cheers,
> JH
> --
> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
> Dr. John Hopkins, BSc, MFA, PhD
> grounded on a granite batholith
> twitter: @neoscenes
> http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/
> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>
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