We’re finally rid of the spectre of institutional, hegemonic heritage-making. No more grappling with authorised pasts, it’s time for claiming the future and new modes of existence (Latour, 2016; 2018a)!
Building on my previous arguments for designing countercultural heritage, I expand here on my idea towards bolder acts of design and the radical reimagining of heritage, inspired by Bruno Latour’s analysis of politics in the “new climatic regime” (2018b) and design scholar Thomas Markussen’s discussion on the impure politics of design activism which draws on Rancière’s philosophy of art and politics. Now that we are rid of the shackles of the English country house, what prevents us from realising the potential of countercultural heritage-making to its fullest possible extent? Quite a lot, as I will explore below.
In Down to Earth, Latour set out to explain the ‘vectors’ of travel and the attractors that are/were (in 2018) driving politics at a time when national populism, economic deregulation, and growing inequality were increasingly evident against a backdrop of ecological degradation. For Latour these attractors have, temporally, driven public discourse and politics since the dawn of modernism and are best exemplified by six diagrams that appear in the text, two of which I feature here:
Figure 1: Canonical schema of the Moderns’ orientation, in Latour, 2018 p.29
Attractor 1, the ‘Local’ is seen as a non-primitive (“there is nothing aboriginal, nothing native, nothing primitive in this territory after modernization had done away with all the old connections”) and therefore ‘anti-Global’; Attractor 2, the ‘Global’ is a spatial and temporal move towards futures which are scientific, economic and moral horizons towards wealth, freedom, knowledge and access to life. Figure 1 also includes the political orientations of ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ which, as we see on this diagram both show tendencies which reject or support globalization ideas.
Fast-forward to a Trump-era, planetary crisis period and we see new attractors and vectors of travel:
Figure 2: A new set of alliances, from Down to Earth, Latour, 2018, Figure 6, p.51
Attractor 3 is the ‘Terrestrial’, our planet Earth which is also identified here as a political actor; Attractor 4 is ‘Out-of-This-World’ is a Trumpian, climate-denying “horizon of people who no longer belong to the realities of an earth that would react to their actions” (Latour, 2018, p.34-35).
In his (posthumously published) On the Emergence of an Ecological Class, Latour expands his thesis still further by suggesting that the ecological crisis that we confront has created a majority—the ecological class—made up of “’brothers in arms’ activists who, from a social or cultural standpoint, belong to quite different life forms” (Latour, 2022, p.7). Latour’s identification of a disorientation with normative politics and positionings reveals the contradictions perpetuated by these strange attractors. The under-employed digital worker in service to the modernizing global force of wealthy, social media capitalist finds themselves on possible common political ground with the under-represented indigenous person whose land is being extracted for the precious minerals that the metaverse so heavily relies on.
Latour’s mappings are useful in two ways. Firstly—and pragmatically—they show the usefulness of visualisations as a means of augmenting cognition (Hall & Davila, 2021) and as critical cartography (ibid, p.169)[1]. Secondly, they open up the onto-political dimension of heritage- and future-making, encouraging us to think about the attractors that shape the heterogenous landscapes and networks of community heritage and belonging. What are the attractors and vectors from this worldview? Below I articulate some of the possible attractors in addition to (or perhaps providing higher resolution to) Latour’s four [attractors]:
- Care: Looking out for—or being looked out by—family and friends [local]
- Care: planetary, inter-species [Terrestrial]
- Wealth growth [global]
- Content creator [Out-of-this-world]
- Content consumer [Out-of-this-world]
- Home (acquiring, maintaining) [local]
- Travel and adventure [global]
- Welcoming to all [global]
- Stay out of my village [local]
- The past [?]
- The present [?]
- The future [?]
These attractors may be interpreted as ‘values’ which may (or may not) be shared with like-minded individuals in a community. However they might be understood, they perform as a moral, economic, social and cultural compass which points the way towards a particular trajectory or vector (and away from another attractor). Such an abstraction helps us understand that the pull of an attractor (and the push away from another) occurs on a vector which is not smooth or straight-lined in a Cartesian manner, but full of struggles, pitfalls and setbacks, deviations, misguidance and loss.
These everyday concerns are not to be taken lightly. They require further understanding. They are important to the participatory, inclusive ethos of contemporary design practice: we must understand what real humans think of the problems (or attractors!) they are confronted by. Walk into any post-industrial town or city in the North of England is to confront this dilemma head-on. The gradual gentrification of former centres of industrial power drives communities out of affordable housing and into a ghettoised pseudo-conflict with immigrants, ‘other’ classes (at both ends of the socio-economic scale), and invisible forces of state power.
The invisible dark matter responsible for creating a diminishing status for the nation state of ‘Great’ Britain includes the forces of climate catastrophe (e.g. energy un-democracy; migration-fuelled conflict; food shortages from weaknesses in the food production system post-Brexit; hunger borne from poverty), political ineptness (corruption, nepotism, elitism) and a global war (of ideology, of territory and cyberspace). The 200-year project of shifting from industrial to ecological logics is therefore undermined by these real forces, bringing together unlikely constituents such as far-right extremists and left-wing environmentalists (Latour & Schultz, 2022, p.46). If we acknowledge the ontological shifting required at first, how can we then, secondly, use design to help smooth out those vectors of travel or alleviate the struggles? Perhaps through a form of design activism?
There are multiple ways that design can shape political discourse (Bieling, 2019), including by promoting social change, raising awareness of values and beliefs [attractors?], or questioning the constraints of mass production and consumerism on everyday life (Markussen, 2013). Fuad-Luke (2013) and Thorpe (2013; 2014) have shown how design can be used in support of environmental activism, but Markussen suggests that the dissensus and consensus approach taken by these environmentalists “enslaves design activism to hegemony of existing systems of power” (Markussen, 2019, p.36). Instead, Markussen suggests that design operates within the ‘messy’ space of dissensus and consensus. Any momentary disruption occurs through an aesthetic dissensus, opening up the gap between prescribed ways of doing and making and unanticipated ways of doing and making (ibid, p42). The politics of design activism are described by Markussen as “an impure politics” (as opposed to a pure politics manifest in institutional policy-making and policing) which can still lead to new (different) processes of exclusion and inclusion that exercises of power will follow. At best, acts of design activism “lead to police orders doing good and not bad things” (p.43).
Markussen builds his argument on the foundation of Jacques Rancière’s identification of art (aesthetics) as a form of politics and politics itself as a form of art (Rancière, 2010). For Rancière, art introduces subjects and objects into the social field of perception, which helps to reorient perceptual space and Markussen suggests that design activism should also be seen to function—like paintings, poetry, sculpture and theatre—as an aesthetic practice not just a socio-political one (Markussen, 2013, p.39). If Rancière saw aesthetics as “making what was unseen visible” (Rancière, 2010, p.46) he also saw aesthetics as a form of dissensus: “dissensus is not a confrontation between interests or opinions…It is the demonstration (manifestation) of a gap in the sensible itself” (ibid). The question as to how design can exhibit agency towards a vector of mutualism (Kropotkin, 2022[1902]), pluralism and care may be answered by processes of community- and heritage-making which is design activist in ethos.
If we return to the original idea of a countercultural heritage-making, what place might designing such a heritage take in the attractor-infested world? What can we learn from the past (our history) and present (our place) to shape good and not bad things for the future? As has been written ad nauseum, we can imagine the end of the world through climate change sooner than we can conceive of the ending of the very reason we got in this situation in the first place—capitalism[2]. The problem of imagining a future which is post-capitalist, planetary-centred is that everyday politics does not offer an aesthetic vision for what might be. We are wedded to the industrial, market-imperatives (still) and the ‘pure politics’ of Westminster and city council chambers fails to offer any imaginary alternative. Industrial towns—indeed the UK as a whole—cannot yet imagine a world that does not rely on economic growth even though these towns and cities are no longer the sites of heavy industry. The suggested answer to poverty, health inequality and political polarisation is to focus on the economic levelling up, not on ideas of mutualism and communitarianism. Ideas such as degrowth (Hickel, 2020) and postcapitalism have been wrongly construed as ‘anti-capitalism’, when they are more ‘after capitalism’ (Wizinsky, 2022, p.2-3). As Peter Frase has suggested, the often-conflicting promises of technological (AI & robotics) futures in confronting climate change highlights the “diametrically opposites…of scarcity [of natural resources]…and abundance [automation-driven production]” create a historical moment “so volatile and uncertain, full of both promise and danger” [my italics] (Frase, 2016, p.2-3). We do not know what to wish for!
On a vector from past to future, is it possible to anchor ourselves in place by using heritages—and I mean this by the plural and intersectional histories that we individually relate to—whilst heading towards an (improved) future? Can we use (industrial and pre-industrial) history to teach us anything about how to relate to each other, with other species and our terra firma? Can we use places of history-making, interpretation and representation as jump-off points for vector-travelling towards less-strange, less-divisive attractors? How might we use the dissensus of designing for countercultural heritage as the foundation for alternative (pure) politics, policy-making and policing? At the origin-point of the industrial revolution, how do we now involve a genuinely diverse constituency of the ecological (or dare I say, precarious) class to serve their interests, whilst also bringing to the foreground the aesthetic, imaginary, radical, as-yet-unseen design futures?
References:
Bieling, T. (2019). Designing Activism: An Introduction. In T. Bieling (Ed.), Design (&) Activism: Perspectives on Design As Activism and Activism As Design. Minesis International.
Fuad-Luke, A (2009[2013]) Design Activism: Beautiful Strangeness for a Sustainable World, Taylor & Francis Group, Oxford.
Hall, P.A. and Davila, P. (2021) Critical visualization : rethinking the representation of data. First edition. London [England]: Bloomsbury Visual Arts. Available at: https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350077270
Hickel, J. (2020) Less is more how degrowth will save the world. London: William Heinemann.
Kropotkin, P. (2022[1902]) Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, 2nd Edition (w.David Priestland). Penguin Random House.
Latour, B. (ed.) (2016) Reset modernity! Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
Latour, B. (2018a). An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns (C. Porter (translation), Ed.). Harvard University Press.
Latour, B. (2018b). Down to Earth, Politics in the New Climatic Regime. Polity Press.
Latour, B. & Schultz, N (2022) On the Emergence of an Ecological Class: A Memo (Rose, J, translator), Polity Press.
Markussen, T. (2013). The Disruptive Aesthetics of Design Activism: Enacting Design Between Art and Politics. Source: Design Issues, 29(1), 38–50. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24267101
Markussen, T. (2019). The impure politics of design activism. In T. Bieling (Ed.), Design (&) Activism: Perspectives on design as activism and activism as design (pp. 35-46). Mimesis edizioni. http://mimesisinternational.com/design-activism-perspectives-on-design-as-activism-and-activism-as-design/
Rancière, J. and Corcoran, S. (2010) Dissensus : on politics and aesthetics. London: Continuum.
Thorpe, A. (2014). Applying Protest Event Analysis to Architecture and Design. In Social Movement Studies (Vol. 13, Issue 2, pp. 275–295). Taylor & Francis. https://doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2013.823346
Wizinsky, M (2022) Design after Capitalism: Transforming Design Today for an Equitable Tomorrow, Cambridge, MA & London: MIT Press.
[1] Hall & Dávila cite Christian Nold’s Stockport Emotion Map (2007) which was commissioned by Stockport Council and Lend Lease to map the psychogeographies of approximately 200 people.
[2] By contrast, a cartoon in Private Eye Issue No.1622, p.24 shows two environmentalists, one reading the news headlines of global conflicts and commenting that for the first time she can imagine the end of the world not through climate change.
