[-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 118, Issue 4

[Ross Exo Adams]

I’d like to respond to the general sense of ‘what is to be done’ that
is emerging here with regard to the role ‘design’ plays as both a
discursive category and as a practice. I’m especially moved by what
Adam has suggested, that design needs to become unrecognizable to
itself. I think this is a fantastic way to think about it. And one way
to estrange a practice from itself is to shift the object of design
itself, which, as Adrian offers, should be the very relations of
production/reproduction. I find this provocatively relevant and
challenging (especially as someone who teaches design).

However, for me, I suppose the question is not so much how do you
subvert the program of neoliberalism, precisely because there is no
single program through which neoliberalism operates. I applaud many of
the efforts by the relatively few designers, activists, artists and so
on able to translate the complexities of contemporary labor relations,
consumption, etc., to create interventions in city spaces which bring
to light certain injustices, asymmetries or otherwise to
light—objects, equipment, instruments and the like making visible a
public discourse that would otherwise be drowned out the distractions
of the standard atmospheric urban spaces of contemporary capitalist
culture. But I also am often struck by their limitations. In many
cases these interventions treat space as a kind of neutral container
whose contents are dominated by neoliberal interests, and thus it is
simply a matter of occupying a part of that space in order to counter
this tendency.

I think there needs to be much more work put in to looking at what we
could call the spatio-political orders that constitute the world under
neoliberal (or more broadly, liberal) forms of power. What my own
research looks at is to try to see how urban space may be precisely
such a spatial order, whose configuration, materiality, organization
and so on—all relatively new to the world—is not a representation of
contemporary political form, but is itself contemporary political
form: both spatial order and political form, means and ends.

In this way, it suddenly poses the question of design as a radical
practice in new light: it is no longer a matter of only making visible
a certain discourse of politics through its presentation in space, but
actually of constructing new configurations of space altogether. In
other words, the urban is not, for me, the site of conflict,
inequality, exploitation as well as the source of creative
intervention, collectivity, etc.; rather, the urban itself that is the
problem we address when we talk about the antinomies of contemporary
politics (neoliberal or otherwise). And if we understand 'the urban’
as a spatio-political order predicated on its limitless expansion
(urbanization), then we can imagine how today this is a category that
immediately evades any ontology of city/country, interior/exterior,
etc. and indeed could be said to condition the entire space of the
world today, perhaps more than any other spatio-political category
today.

Design, for me, is the rigorous activity of imagining and constituting
a space (and thus a politics) which goes beyond the oppressive
biopolitics and territorial technologies that the urban imposes on
life today. How can we imagine a spatial organization truly beyond the
urban?
Ross Exo Adams, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Architecture
College of Design
Iowa State University

595 Design
158 College of Design
Ames, IA 50011


On Thu, Sep 11, 2014 at 9:00 PM,  <empyre-request at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au> wrote:
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> Today's Topics:
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>    1. Re: empyre Digest, Vol 118, Issue 1 (John Hopkins)
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> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
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> Message: 1
> Date: Wed, 10 Sep 2014 15:04:45 -0700
> From: John Hopkins <jhopkins at neoscenes.net>
> To: empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> Subject: Re: [-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 118, Issue 1
> Message-ID: <5410CAFD.8020306 at neoscenes.net>
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>> 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/
> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>
>
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> End of empyre Digest, Vol 118, Issue 4
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