THEORY IS DEAD, MAY IT LIVE LONG AND PROSPER.

After attending the New Contexts conference as a co-author, it has taken a few weeks for my brain to process the entire event. In a way participating in the co-authoring sessions was akin to the dream logic of both being yourself and being a fly on the wall watching yourself writhe around under the microscope with a dozen other participants as a new audience rolled in every hour. The audience appeared bored and engaged in equal measures. Perhaps they found the process itself entertaining as the whole structure of the concurrent sessions made it feel like the intellectual equivalent of theater hopping a  multiplex movie theater. No need to watch one three-hour long movie, just watch one hour of three different movies! This has been done and amusingly well documented.

It is tempting to “review” my particular session, but at this point it seems more important to try to shed a bit of light on the recurring issues that were endemic to the conference as a whole. Perhaps one of the most glaring and telling absences is a total lack of any kind of interest in theory. Far from being something particular to design education, the entire design field seems obsessed with praxis. Theory is rendered ineffectual or irrelevant. Perhaps this is a reaction to the massive assimilation of post-modernist and post-structuralist ideas in the last couple of decades. The once vanguard is now taken for granted. These upheavals are now merely historical. But it is telling that no one seems to be able to coherently describe the common set of dilemmas that all the sessions seemed to raise. If the whole concept of “theory” is still strangely ill-defined in design, in the most basic sense it is a way of explaining (or rationalizing) design in a larger context. But the explanations theory may offer are explanations often without easy answers, a state of willful contradiction that I think makes it easy to dismiss it’s relevance.

The final reports for each of the New Contexts sessions had the same keywords pop-up over and over again: “systems”, “tools”, “research”, “opportunity”, “social”, “emergent”, “knowledge”. In light of David Thorburn’s provocation these seem like apt reactions to what he characterizes as an era of chronic (and perhaps permanent) instability and transition based on massive transformations to our communication systems. Literally everything we consider foundational to design or education can be called into question. Yet at present there seem to be no leading “theories” that confront or describe the vast changes that networked technologies have wrought. The post-structuralist name dropping has ceased, but let me have the audacity to suggest that there are people who have begun to think about these conditions in all their pervasive, uber-networked, distempered glory. Both Bruce Sterling and Kazys Varnelis have staked out interesting footholds in attempting to understand this era.

Sterling is of course most well known as visionary gadfly and ex-cyberpunk novelist. Despite his image as a kind of snake oil salesman for technological “innovation” Sterling does have a remarkable ability to put into words the “zeitgeist” of a given era. His Transmediale 2010 keynote on “Atemporality for the Creative Artist” is probably best viewed as a video (a transcript is provided on his blog here), his schtick is weirdly charming and annoying at the same time, yet ultimately effective. The idea that atemporality defines this era is seductive. Instead of the “timeless” the old modernist trope of design “quality”, we have a kind of “non-time”, where historical categories and hierarchies have broken dow, the mashup is the lingua franca and networked technologies provide 365/24/7 availability no matter what timezone you live in. Sterling is aware of the pernicious effects of the atemporal, he’s not merely cheerleading, but he thinks that engagement, not avoidance, is the way out.

Kazys Varnelis is in many ways the more interesting figure here. Trained as an architectural historian at Cornell, he currently heads the Network Architecture Lab at Columbia’s GSAPP. His research works almost in parallel to Sterling’s ideas (they both admit to a cross-fertilization of ideas particularly when it comes to notions of the atemporal), but Varnelis is far more ambitious. His book “Culture in the Age of Networks: A Critical History” which he has posted in draft form on his website, is a work that attempts to “synthesize a historical understanding of our era, coming to terms with the changed conditions in culture, subjectivity, ideology, and aesthetics that characterize our new, networked age.” Heady stuff, but Varnelis is adept at providing crucial linkages with post-structuralism and the post 9/11 era. This paragraph from his preface in many ways perfectly encapsulates most of the dilemmas raised at the New Contexts conference:

Postmodernity is long gone. An undergraduate today has no experience of it, nor do they recall a world before the Internet and mobile telephony, a political condition prior to neoliberalism, or an oppositional culture that had not been colonized. But we have also not had any kind of clearly identifiable rupture with postmodernity. Instead, I see network culture as an intensification of conditions latent in modernity and postmodernity. The subject, art, media, time, space, politics, the economy, and the public sphere are all radically changing, but this change is a process in which existing conditions intensify to entirely new conditions, thus sometimes becoming unrecognizable.

Neither Sterling or Varnelis have any coherent answers and most of what they do is suss out the contradictions and histories of what most of us take for granted. It is odd to live in an era that is so readily theorizes and contemplates its place in a historical continuum so quickly. But that is the nature of intensification. The brick has been thrown on the accelerator and there is no going back.

ON THACKARA

In re-watching John Thackara’s New Contexts provocation it is interesting to note that despite his focus on ethics in design, and the proverbial “wicked problems” there was little of instructive use or insight. Thackara strangely anchored most of his arguments on the twin ideals of a zero growth economy and zero tolerance of negative externalities. Utopian perhaps, but entirely ignorant of some basic economic concepts. Would anyone actually want to live in a stagnant economy with presumably negative population growth, draconian environmental controls and a total inability to deal with any sort of changes in a global economy? Sounds like a nightmarish scenario and it is ridiculously at odds with the rest of his emphasis on approaching “wicked problems” in a collaborative, flexible and local manner. Never mind that Thackara’s approach to these wicked systemic problems is disjointed to the extreme. Problems that scale globally and are beholden to vast economic and political interests seem like they would be entirely immune to design tyros acting in a local, ad hoc manner, no matter who their collaborators might be. I can accept provocations that I might disagree with, but it’s the massive internal contradictions that bother me. In the end Thackara’s framing of designers as “well positioned” to offer “conversations and connections” only seems to underline a certain cynical mistrust of what designers actually do: make things (and when I say “things” I mean that in the broadest possible sense whether they be virtual, experiential, or material). If collectively we have been reduced to being the barfly at the local pub, then I guess we are completely screwed.