Thinking with Words
Shortly after beginning to teach in the early 2000s I began a practice of writing—often for conferences, alternatively for workshops and publications. A selection of them are included here for your reading pleasure, from an early allegory to a full-blown dissertation.
This was my first academic paper, disguised as an allegory. I had travelled to Australia on a research grant to meet with design theorist Tony Fry and others. I had been reading the online journal he and Anne-Marie Willis used to edit— Design Philosophy Papers—and travelled to Australia in 2007 to meet with them and others for conversations. I also met with Laurene Vaughan, an RMIT professor in Melbourne, who invited me to submit a paper for a journal she was editing, published by the Australian Graphic Design Association (AGDA). It was to be my first published academic paper.
When I returned to Portland and began to write, the words came out in the form of an allegory. I sent it out for peer review, and it came back with the suggestion I add footnotes. I added 26 of them, the first of which referred to Heidegger’s concept of world, and the paper was accepted for publication.
I’ve written many academic papers since then in more standard form. But this first paper verified for me an insight that I have long held: that creative activity has primacy as the driver of intelligence in most of human endeavour.
This paper reflects my abiding interest in design and art history as well as the desire to join the agency of design to theoretical and academic work at the time of ecological crisis. It was published in Design Philosophy Papers. Here is the abstract:
There are two broad reasons for the study of design history: to understand how design has shaped our past and present; and for today’s designers to gain the necessary perspective to design for our present and future. Models of design history which are not rooted in practice, i.e., do not allow us to understand the designing effects of our design practices, only further the habitus of ignorance that has already led us to a condition of unsustainability. It is lucky that design history is a young discipline and was based on the errors of art history: we might have a chance to change it, even rewrite it – which is what we will need to do. If we must redesign design, we need to rewrite its history.
This paper uses three sources with the ambitious aims of making humans have more respect for our ecosystem and having more generosity to other beings in order that we can aim for having more future, not less.
The sources I use include, first, Rittel and Weber, whose 1973 paper, “Dilemmas in a general theory of planning,” articulated the concept of the “wicked problem”; second, a book by Jablonka and Lamb published in 2005 extending the idea of evolution from an exclusively genetic process to one including three additional dimensions, viz., the epigenetic, behavioral, and symbolic dimensions; and, finally, a most interesting essay by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, “On What We Can Not Do,” derived from a reading of Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener.” Agamben writes in this essay, from his 2010 book Nudities:
“Separated from his impotentiality [his power to not do], today’s man believes himself capable of everything, and so he repeats his jovial “no problem,” and his irresponsible “I can do it,” precisely when he should realize that he has been consigned in unheard of measure to forces and processes over which he has lost all control. He has become blind not to his capacities but to his incapacities, not to what he can do but to what he cannot, or can not, do.”
A few years after my ‘fable’ had been published in Australia, Laurene Vaughan organized a collaborative workshop in Montreal at Concordia University’s Geography department. I used the workshop as an opportunity to explore the relationship between my ongoing practice of photography and my increasingly theoretical orientation. Below is an excerpt from the proposal I wrote for the workshop:
Is it possible to represent ontological unsustainability? Can we localize it on a map or represent it photographically? In order to explore these questions, the methodology of ‘correlative ontography’ was developed, correlating a practice of photography to mapped data of the presence of diseases indicative of environmental causes in the city of Montreal.
An edited version of this paper was published by Springer Verlag in the book Mapping Environmental Issues in the City. If you prefer a longer, more philosophical text, click the title to the left.
A student once recommended I watch the Pixar/Disney film Wall-E, given my increasing interest in ecological issues. Always suspicious of Disney, I nonetheless have screened this film numerous times for courses in visual culture. This paper uses Wall-E in order to articulate the way we use images in the effort to manage our personal and species finitude. The proposal I wrote for a presentation to a conference in Warsaw states:
Humans attempt to manage their relation to the ontic fact of finitude through a multiplicity of diversions, illusions and confrontations. The image, considered both as cognitive construction and visual artifact, is at the core of this process; and the film Wall-E is a particularly interesting and illustrative example.…Wall-E uses common tropes of romantic entanglement and heroic victory in order to secure our assent for undertaking the task of meeting our next evolutionary bottleneck.
The Future is an Image is a PhD dissertation I completed in 2015. After a decade of writing a series of short papers on issues of unsustainability and design, it was an opportunity to delve deeper. My advisor was Catherine Malabou, a philosopher who had been writing on the concept of plasticity from a variety of perspectives from neuroscience to the work of philosophy. I engaged the concept as it related to the image and to future. The question I ask is: how do we use images in a way that threatens our future, and how might we use the image to sustain a future? Here is who I state it in the abstract:
In a world unsustainable by design, we must rethink our relation to the image. To do so, I activate Malabou’s concept of plasticity to propose a materialist conception of the image as imago, which consists of the object in the world in interaction with the neural networks in the brain. Reviewing both a history of human unsustainability and a history of the idea of future, I then consider Derrida’s notion of time as trace and Malabou’s formulation of plasticity, the latter as derived from Hegel and as applied to the image. Finally, I consider the historical rift that developed between art and design at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and review its contemporary configuration in the work of Ranciére, Berardi and Groys. I conclude by proposing a new model of image practice as arte-facture, the activity of making-wonder.