To produce art and intellectual work about the disposable populations is as important as the act of teaching ourselves how to read, how to see, how to explore the contradictions of our society. Cultures of cruelty and cultures of stereotype rely upon the viewer, the reader, to be passive, to consume cultural artifacts and intellectual products. (15:26)

And yet, from Jacques Rancière:

Being a spectator is not some passive condition that we should transform into activity. It is our normal situation. We also learn and teach, act and know, as spectators who all the time link what we see to what we have seen and said, done and dreamed. There is no more a privileged form than there is a privileged starting point. Everywhere there are starting points, intersections and junctions that enable us to learn something new if we refuse, firstly, radical distance, secondly the distribution of roles, and thirdly the boundaries between territories. We do not have to transform spectators into actors, and ignoramuses into scholars. We have to recognize the knowledge at work in the ignoramus and the activity peculiar to the spectator. Every spectator is already an actor in her story; every actor, every man of action, is the spectator of the same story.

Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 02009), 17

Popular culture is progressive, not revolutionary. Radical art forms that oppose or ignore the structures of domination can never be popular because they cannot offer points of pertinence to the everyday life of the people, for everyday life is a series of tactical maneuvers against the strategy of the colonizing forces. It cannot produce the conditions of its existence, but must make do with those it has, often turning them against the system that produces them. Radical art tries to create its own terms of existence, to free itself from the status quo. It has an important place in a system of culture, and some of its radicalness may filter through to, and increase the progressiveness of, popular art, but it can never, in itself, be popular. Indeed Bourdieu argues that radical art is bourgeois and lies outside the bounds of popular taste, while Barthes suggests that avant-garde art can only cause a conflict between fractions of the bourgeoisie, but can never be part of a class struggle. The political effectivity of radical art is limited by inability to be relevant to the everyday life of the people, and, by the same token, any radicalness of popular art is equally limited by the same requirement of relevance.

John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 01989), 161

But for the past three or four decades the major role of graphic design has been to create the branding and collateral of desire. For those who can afford entry into this world — no harm is done. For those who can resist the blandishments of this world — no harm is done. But for those who have neither the education nor emotional maturity to deal with this, immense harm is done.

Though I was pleased initially to read a discussion on the ethical responsibilities of graphic designers, its outcome disappointed me. Indeed it was hard for me to read Shaughnessy’s article and not think that he was implying, as Daring Fireball’s John Gruber put it, that “[p]oor people are too stupid to deal with well-designed stuff.”

Since Plato’s Republic, the idea that the working class and the poor (and women, and non-Westerners, etc.) are not equipped — “have neither the education nor emotional maturity” — to deal with the world has been used as justification to impose various forms of control on these groups. The “world” of course doesn’t need to be anything in particular. It can be art, literature, the “reality” of politics, or the alluring fiction of luxury brands. The general public is incapable of dealing with any of it we’re told.^* So although Shaughnessy meant to say, I think, that lack of educational and economic opportunities exacerbates the tension between what consumer culture makes available (and desirable) and the price, literal or figurative, we must pay to get those things, he ended up sabotaging his argument by using a reactionary trope to support it.

Instead, Shaughnessy could have pointed out that looters, as consumers of a particular kind, the kind that doesn’t pay, responded to brands like other consumers do. They wanted those products for the same reasons everybody else does. In that sense, there is little difference between shoppers and looters, between “us” and “them.” And so, if “immense harm” can be done to them by graphic design when it serves capitalism, and if their looting spree is our shopping spree, can we really say that “no harm is done” to us simply because we can pay for stuff? Or, to put it another way, supposing the problem with graphic design is that it perpetually makes us want things, does that problem go away if we can buy those things?

^*In Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Pierre Bourdieu showed how upper class taste is driven by the converse idea: the upper class is in control and can show restraint where the lower classes can’t. Expensive designs embody this idea. They are often sparse and monochromatic.

Sketches for “pothole” from the Iconathon blog.
Original photo by linepithomatic

(via Social Design Notes)

A few weeks ago, I noticed an item in a newspaper saying that the business tycoon Sir Richard Branson was thinking of moving his headquarters to Switzerland. This move was represented as a potential blow to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, because it meant less tax revenue.

I couldn’t help thinking that in a sane and decent world such a move would be a blow to Sir Richard, not the Chancellor. People would note that a prominent and wealthy businessman was avoiding British tax and think less of him. Instead, he has a knighthood and is widely feted. The same is true of the brilliant retailer Sir Philip Green. Sir Philip’s businesses could never survive but for Britain’s famous social and political stability, our transport system to shift his goods and our schools to educate his workers.

Yet Sir Philip, who a few years ago sent an extraordinary £1 billion dividend offshore, seems to have little intention of paying for much of this. Why does nobody get angry or hold him culpable? I know that he employs expensive tax lawyers and that everything he does is legal, but he surely faces ethical and moral questions just as much as does a young thug who breaks into one of Sir Philip’s shops and steals from it?

(via prosthetic knowledge)

“What Nixon did – and what Ailes does today in the age of Obama – is unravel and rewire one of the most powerful of human emotions: shame,” says Perlstein, the author of Nixonland. “He takes the shame of people who feel that they are being looked down on, and he mobilises it for political purposes. Roger Ailes is a direct link between the Nixonian politics of resentment and Sarah Palin’s politics of resentment.”

Faced with this dramatic increase in the incoming modern human population, the capacity of the local Neanderthal groups to compete for the same range of living sites, the same range of animal food supplies (principally reindeer, horse, bison and red deer), and the same scarce fuel supplies to tide the groups over the extremely harsh glacial winters, would have been massively undermined. Additionally, almost inevitably, repeated conflicts or confrontations between the two populations would arise for occupation of the most attractive locations and richest food supplies, in which the increased numbers and more highly coordinated activities of the modern human groups would ensure their success over the Neanderthal groups.

The ability of modern humans to establish contact among themselves and take advantage of these connections may also have been a factor in their — our? — success.

[Homo Sapiens] also appear to have had more wide-ranging social contacts with adjacent human groups to allow for trade and exchange of essential food supplies in times of food scarcity.

The word “crusade”—while common and acceptable in 1951 when we were founded—now carries negative associations.

The first thing to note is that it took them a long time to figure out that “crusade” wasn’t the friendly word they thought it was back in 1951. Although the word was probably acceptable to some in 1951, it wasn’t any less problematic back then. Recent events have just made that fact impossible to ignore.

The second is that a crusade by any other name still stinks. This rebranding only hides the smell by shortening our exposure to it (by four letters). While the same FAQ tells us that “Cru has been field tested since the mid-90’s [sic] without carrying any of the negative connotations of the word Crusade,” the concept of the crusade is still there. This should have been an opportunity to change and make things right. Instead they chose to perpetuate an offensive idea by making it available to a new generation in a trendy-ish form.

Wolfgang Tillmans; title, medium, and date unknown
(screenshot from a talk Tillmans gave at the University of Brighton in October 02010)

Delta Shelter, 02005. (Arch: Tom Kundig; Photo: Tim Bies)

Second, TNA’s “Ring House” in Karuizawa, Nagano prefecture, photographed by Jimmy Cohrssen.

Ring House, 02006. (Arch: TNA, Tokyo; Photo: Jimmy Cohrssen)

Victor Enrich, Shalom Tower (Tel Aviv)

Adam Ryder, meanwhile, used existing buildings and “natural” landscapes to create an atlas of a fictional world: Areth: an Architectural Atlas.

Adam Ryder, Fabrication Facility Phi (from “Areth: an Architectural Atlas”)