Subversive affirmation in design
Don’t think of pink elephants! What resists, will persist. It’s human nature. Moralising designers will eventually coerce them into doing the opposite.
Research into postcapitalist design and the designer as change agent, has led to question the following: can commercial (capitalist) design practices lead to the erosion of capitalism?
One thing that I have been curious about, a thing that I have found myself drawn back to time and time again is our ability, including and especially my own, to do the opposite thing that you initially intend or asked to do. For example: don’t think of pink elephants!
Moralising and patronising people often has the opposite effect or it simply makes you more supportive of the thing that stands against it. Preach postcapitalist design theory, and you may end up with designers just wanting to do the opposite. I’ve found some interesting theory to make this probable. Here’s two:
One, Mike Grimshaw’s Hermeneutic Capitalism. Applied to postcapitalist theory, it is about how it should be done from “weak thought” and from within capitalism, not outside it. And two, Robert Pfaller’s interpassivity. Interpassivity is a way in which subjects delegate their emotional, cognitive, or political involvement to external actors, or the Big Other, preserving the illusion of participation. It highlights how ideology can sustain itself by allowing people to be passively complicit while feeling engaged.
That leads me to hope, and the type of hope that keeps people thinking that things can be “fixed”.
What Lies Ahead When There Is No Future? (Žižek 2023) is a book that emphasises a mentality or a point of view that we are too late to save our planet and our communities from marginalisation and inequality. We are too late to fix things. And yet there are countless books out there that serve up our current crisis, but with an element of hope because you can’t sell books if it is nihilistic or pessimistic. And the same goes for documentaries. Do you serve up a final chapter of hope despite the data showing we’re headed for catastrophe? “As a psychoanalyst will tell you, melancholy precedes prohibition. What makes melancholy so deadening is that objects of desire are here, the subject just no longer desires them. The function of prohibition is to shatter the subject out of melancholic lethargy and set alive its desire”(Žižek 2023,20). Has hope lost its lustre? Will we only awake from our melancholic consumerism when we are told that there is no more hope - to try and prove the naysayers wrong?
Approaching it from an angle that it is too late and we can’t erode capitalism from the outside, then we can see a majority of humanity embracing capitalism and technology without restraint. Like one last party before the world comes to an end?
This prohibition or this affirmation that we are doomed may spark people to act in opposition of that and the same can be true of a post-capitalist mindset. “So the passage to whatever version of post capitalism will be not only a very complex process at the level of the economy it will also confront us with new problems of libidinal economy, no critique of political economy without a critique of libidinal economy.” (Žižek 2023,100)
It appears that my research could potentially argue or highlight the potential for true erosion of capitalism from within capitalism due to people’s ideological complicit drives to continue living despite the environmental and socio-economic disparities it creates.
This contradiction or subversive affirmation led me to discover the global state of NSK. I feel like the work is heading in this direction and I could potentially compare and contrast my argument with the work done by the NSK.
Subversive affirmation is a cognitive artefact as well as a physical artefact. Design thinking and “designing” also have both these artefacts. In fact, research through design does not start with physical artefacts, cognitive artefacts are created first (memory/knowledge). If agency was to take affect it would happen first on a cognitive level. This means that designers won’t enact change through the physical artefacts but that change happens on an affective and cognitive level. Critique of the libidinal economy was first Discussed by Lyotard. Which led me to the discovery of micropolitics of desire and the critique of contemporary Continental theory. This led me to the discovery of accelerationism, a philosophical and political theory that suggests the best way to overcome capitalism is not by resisting it directly, but by pushing its inherent tendencies to their extreme. The core idea is that by accelerating the development of capitalism’s technological, economic, and social mechanisms, its contradictions will become so intensified that the system will eventually implode, creating conditions for a radical societal transformation. This approach diverges from traditional leftist strategies that aim to curb or dismantle capitalism directly through protest or reform – Wizinsky’s Design After Capitalism is an example of this traditional leftist strategy.
The question is agency. More specifically the artifacts designers produce. “We analyse design as a type of cognitive activity not as a professional Status” (Simon 1996). This was an idea advanced by Herbert Simon “this means that the activities of many professions who are not categorised as designers would be qualified design” (Visser 2006). So the real question lies not with designers agency but the agency of people en masse, of consumers as unintended (ontological) designers. “Everyone designs who devices courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones”(Simon 1996).
Given that consumers are unconscious (ontological) agents creating cognitive and affective artefacts to our own detriment, I would like to pursue an argument for subversive affirmation as a framework for my work.
References
Simon, Herbert A. 1996. “The Sciences of the Artificial.” MIT Press.
Visser, Willemien. 2006. “The Cognitive Artifacts of Designing / Willemien Visser.” L. Erlbaum Associates.
Žižek, Slavoj. 2023. What Lies Ahead When There Is No Future? Dublin: Allen Lane.
