Title image: Wanguo Quantu (萬國全圖), “Complete map of all the countries”, produced under guidance from Jesuit missionaries, c1620s. One of the earlier world maps in the European style to be produced in China, specifically modified to position China as central. These maps introduced modern/colonial European conceptions of ‘the world’ into Chinese thinking, as discussed in Walter Mignolo’s The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, & Colonization.
In a similar and related discussion, Tony Fry writes on the ontological designing of artefacts in China’s drive towards modernisation:
All performative objects arrive out of, and carry, a theory of knowledge and functional intent, which is to say that designed objects and their technologies are epistemologically inscribed. To empirically discover this is not merely an act of disclosure, or the revelation of potential design innovations, but also it is an exposure to a process of ontological change through an encounter with new knowledge linking to the gaining of new skills. It follows that instruction and training are not purely delimited by their intended functionalist ends but equally are directive of subject(ive) change. - ‘China vs China: Conflict and translation’, Design in the Borderlands, p. 24
Hi Luiza and Pedro,
Thanks for the invitation to respond to your ‘Cheat Sheet for a Non- (or Less-) Colonialist Speculative Design’. I found it a valuable read, particularly as it prompted me to revisit some reflections on the debate that I hadn’t yet gotten around to writing.
My immediate feeling on reading was of the generosity that you are showing here. Clearly there are a lot of people with various kinds of investments in (a particular kind of) Speculative/Critical Design (SCD) who have been thrown into a confused and anxious state by having their limits reflected back at them. The unsurprising irony of course is that all the flailing is a consequence of being confronted with actual criticism and debate, precisely what prominent practitioners of SCD had professed to be cultivating. As we and many others have observed, this pretense to be ‘fostering debate and discussion’ has always been an idealised but delayed object of SCD, a way of justifying the production of nice looking images and gestural chatter, but never something that was taken seriously. SCD has always been grounded in liberal pluralist understanding of the political, in which the production of discourse was prioritised as a sufficient in itself, to the exclusion of decision, disagreement, and position taking. That kind of work was supposed to happen elsewhere, not in a space or manner that might disturb the ordinary activity of SCD. No one was willing to take responsibility for fostering a mode of acting — through intentional discussion, writing, thinking and design — that was obstinate and resolute enough to produce change. No one was willing to confront serious issues, draw a line at what was no longer acceptable, and take sides in defending a demand for change. It was always easier to go with the flow and reap the rewards, opportunities and accolades that flowed.
What we have seen unfold this year, however, is a public refusal of the terms of this game, a kind of micro revolt that continues to ripple and rankle. We are by no means the only ones who have been critical of SCD, but through the arguments that the two of you in particular have put so much effort into prosecuting its seems obvious that a definitive impact has been made. The question of coloniality is no longer something that those with political power in this field can afford to ignore. The political topography of SCD can now be mapped in terms of those who will more or less effectively address themselves and their work to the reality that eurocentrism will no longer be tolerated.
And therein lies the generosity. You have helped to create a political problem not only for those with power in and over the field, but also those who aspire to that power. Privilege still operates, of course, but many of those who benefit from it are now looking at themselves and to others around them for a way to manage a new set of problems: the (privileged) guilt that arises from recognising that you are guilty, and the anxiety of knowing that others know you know and expect you to act. Of course guilt is a problematic way of framing the experience but I think it gets somewhere near an account of what does happen. Perhaps anxiety might be better as it suggests a more subliminal irritant on the ego that can also manifest as refusal, projection etc.
This goes someway to explaining the freakout — a recognition by people who are comfortable and don’t want to change that they face being displaced from a position and aspiration to power if they don’t. Anti-colonialism is now a form of cultural capital that practitioners within SCD will now seek to accumulate. What your cheat sheet offers is something of a solution to this problem: a way of learning how to do SCD work without reproducing the problems that you have highlighted. You didn’t need to do this. Even though you have made the critique you are not under any obligation to hold the hands of those who use their privilege as an excuse for not knowing, not learning, and not thinking. Producing this list would have taken time and energy on your part which you could have used for other things. But you did it, and I think those who use it ought to see it for the generous act it is.
The situation as it now stands provokes the question: what comes next? Here I would like to widen the frame a little because my position in this has always been one of skepticism concerning the SCD project as a whole. That is to say, even as SCD practitioners begin to take up and apply what you suggest, I think there is still something about SCD itself that requires a more sustained critique. In terms of the perspective that I read from, ontological designing, a key question is what mode of being-in-the-world does SCD design? Or, in other words, what form of world disclosure does SCD induct its practitioners and audiences into, and does this delimit the possibility of a decolonial SCD?
SCD and the world as picture
The fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture. — Martin Heidegger, ‘The age of the world picture’
Here I pick up on an aspect of the critique that Cameron Tonkinwise recently made of Dunne and Raby’s latest book. I mentioned before that SCD was grounded in a liberal pluralist understanding of politics. Cameron’s critique locates an expression of this in the concept of shopping. SCD (and I am extrapolating from Cameron’s reading of DnR) is a project of proliferating images of possible futures to be consumed by those with access to this ‘market place of ideas’. It is a consumerist politics, based in the principle that a market for a product justifies its existence. What interests me here is this metaphor of the shop or market display as it connects to the problematic of representation and the ecology of the image (a concept more fully elaborated in Abby Lopes’ PhD thesis).
In this respect I can only pay lip-service to a more complex line of of thinking, but a quote from Timothy Mitchell’s Colonising Egypt on the imperial representations within the displays of 19th century ‘world’ exhibitions is helpful (p.9):
The remarkable realism of such displays made a strange civilisation into an object the visitor could almost touch. Yet to the observing eye, surrounded by the display but disengaged from it by the status of the visitor, it remained a mere representation, the picture of some strange reality. Thus there were, in fact, two parallel pairs of distinctions, between the visitor and the exhibit, and between the exhibit and what it expressed. The representation was set apart from the real political reality it claimed to portray as the observing mind was set apart from what it observed.
The experience Mitchell is describing here, one that applies to expos, retail displays, zoos, museums, photography, cinema and television, is what Martin Heidegger named the ‘age of the world picture’. That is, the historical event in which Europeans learned to see, treat, and design the world and things in it as though it were a representation of some more ideal, objective reality. As Heidegger suggests, the effect of this now dominant (Western) ontology is disseverance, the opening up of a split between subject and object, one in which ‘world’ is experienced as something that ‘we’, and the image of ‘it’, are not necessarily connected to. This is a space where it is presumed that ideas and images can proliferate in an inconsequential manner, as though they had no bearing on (things that) matter. It is in this modality that liberal pluralism is at home. It is the ontological basis, I might suggest, for cultural appropriation (images, symbols etc. are seen as discrete, autonomous, commodity like things open to free exchange). This liberal ontology, however, is imposed and constructed on a more fundamental violence, a violence that is placed outside the representationalism of ‘civilised’ political discourse (Plato’s allegory of the cave provides a mythic example (the initial pain of the suns’ truth, the struggle to make others ‘see the light’), and Mitchel’s account of the colonisation of Egypt a more concrete example).
This set up is a way of posing the problematic of representation — which you have already engaged in the form of ‘who is to be represented, by whom, and how?’ — in a different way, i.e. what is the significance of representational practices as such, particularly those born out of the culturally expansionist experience of Western modernity/coloniality. In short, my suspicion of SCD lies not simply in its failure to represent a (politically) correct image of the ‘world’, but in the ontological significance of its formally representationalist, liberal pluralist politics. In its commitment to representation as the mode of effecting change, SCD inherently dissevers the subject from action and consequence, as well as the broader possibilities of (ontological) designing.
(Interestingly, the distinction and interplay between political representation and representation as ‘art’ (poiesis) is one that Gayatri Spivak examines as part of her critique of Foucault and Deleuze in ‘Can the subaltern speak?’, staring on p.70)
In this respect — to re-read what has occurred this year — I think it is significant that the revolt over SCDs eurocentrism occurred neither through the efficacy of an image nor a discussion that feigned disinterest or sought ‘common ground’. What was achieved was an ontological shift of political consequence grounded in a refusal to accommodate such nonsense as ‘we don’t talk about class anymore’. What made the difference here was not talk per se (most of this has of course played out in writing and talking), but a refusal to behave in a way that ceded to the authoritative formalities of the field.
Is a decolonial SCD possible?
This raises a second question with consequences for ‘what comes next’. If the achievement of the critique so far has been based on a refusal to be accommodated, perhaps more reflection could be given to what this means as a mode of politics. What I am referring to here is the politics of anti-pluralism, which to be clear is not a politics of homoginising the plural but precisely its opposite: the defense of difference as non-conformity.
Tony Fry discusses the political problem of pluralism in Design as Politics. He also makes the connection between pluralism and ‘world as picture’ in his critical review of The Archeworks Papers which Cameron Tonkinwise discusses in his own review of Becoming Human by Design. Beyond Fry’s direct engagement with pluralism in design politics, anti-pluralist political thinking has been theorised in other contexts that I think are useful to consider in relation to the current debate. This passage from Angela Mitropoulos, for instance, resonates with what I think has unfolded this year:
Ellen Rooney once noted that pluralism is a deeper form of conformism: while it allows for a diversity of content, conflict over the formal procedures which govern interaction are off-limits, as is the power of those in whose image and interest those rules of interaction are constituted. Often, this arises because the procedures established for interaction and the presentation of any resulting ‘unity’ are so habitual that they recede beyond view. Those who raise problems with them therefore tend to be regarded as the sources of conflict if not the architects of a fatal disunity of the class. A familiar, if receding, example: sexism is confined to being a ‘women’s issue’, among a plurality of ‘issues,’ but it cannot disrupt the form of politics.
Here, again, we encounter the political problematic of content vs form(ality), highlighting that it is the ability to structure (design) the rituals through which dissent is expressed that is perhaps a more profound, or at least often overlooked source of political power. Refusal of the form, therefore, becomes a political act that is perhaps more powerful than the much solicited participation or ‘constructive criticism’. Rooney’s book Seductive Reasoning examines this argument in the context of literary criticism, and it is in the concluding chapter that she quotes a stern rebuttal from Spivak on the question of a pluralist feminism:
to embrace pluralism … is to espouse the politics of the masculinist establishment. Pluralism is the method employed by the central authorities to neutralize opposition by seeming to accept it. The gesture of pluralism on the part of the marginal can only mean capitulation to the center. It is not a question of the choice of methodologies but of who is officially in power. However pluralist its demeanor, American liberal masculism (alias humanism) will never declare that it is merely one of many plausible choices.
Spivak’s point resonates with arguments put forward by decolonial theorists such as Walter Mignolo on the possibility of (political) plurality as opposed to liberal pluralism. For Spivak, at the basis of the invitation to ‘come into the fold’ is a requirement to conform to the tacit authority of liberal masculanism. For Mignolo, a similar condition applies to euocentric (Kantian) conceptions of cosmopolitanism; a global community governed by reason (Europe). The radicalism of decolonial plurality lies in the refusal of a ‘neutral’ governing authority, which, as the last 500 years attests to, has been the dominant mode through which colonial power is expressed (e.g. Christianity as the one true religion, the Renaissance interpretation of ‘man’ as the ideal form of human being (humanism), the exchangeability of the commodity form (capitalism), international law as a projection of jus publicum europaeum (global linear thinking) etc.). It is in this context, in search of an anti-pluralist politics of decolonial plurality, that I think the question of representation (‘world as picture’) ought to be re-considered.
The difficult question that I think this raises for SCD practitioners is whether or not the representationalism of SCD sets a formal limit to the possibility of it ever being agent of an anti-pluralistic politics of plurality. Is a decolonial SCD possible, or is SCD a practice that is inherently devoted to reducing plural differences into a singular and ultimately disinterested, disembodied plane of proliferating representations?
