I'm a big fan of HBO's Big Love. I started watching the show because I wanted to know how they were going to deal with the question of plural marriage. Would they take the easy route and condemn it? Would they create characters and scenarios complex enough to resist snap judgments? Would they humanise and idealise it?

In my mind, there's nothing inherently right or wrong about polygamy, any more than there's something inherently right or wrong about monogamy. Personally, I don't much care if someone is monogamous or polygamous, although I prefer monogamy for myself. I am, however, completely fascinated by the power relations in both kinds of relationships. And I do care about excesses, transgressions and abuses of power in any relationship.

Just think about it: Western romantic monogamy is not only the least common type of pair-bonding or marriage in the world, it's actually a rather ambivalent and contradictory practice that hints at unresolved tensions between sex, gender, class, public and private life. Mistresses, concubines, courtesans and prostitutes regularly supplement formal monogamy - at least in private, but sometimes also publically. At the same time, these practices are highly gendered: it remains more common, or at least more public, that men are the tolerated adulterers, the women who sleep with them are the sinners, and the wives are the powerless victims. Historically, no special words were used to describe a woman whose husband committed adultery (it was already part of her linguistic status) but a man whose wife committed adultery earned the shameful (public) title of cuckold. In some monogamous cultures it's still not possible for a man to rape his wife, and in others, only women are punished for extra-marital relations, including ones forced upon her, as in the case of rape. In other places, both men and women face prosecution for extra-marital relations, even if they both consent.

It's easy to see then how little space is left for public explorations or expressions of different kinds of relationships, including same-sex marriage or 'open marriages' and 'polyamorous' relationships - all of which involve monogamy while simultaneously redefining it. We also know how Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions are often conflicted and contradictory about sex in general, and while the ideal-of-monogamy can be productively distinguished from monogamy-in-practice, neither myth nor reality implies or compels stable, egalitarian or non-hierarchical relations. Put simply: monogamy is fraught with power struggles and inequalities no less so than polygamy. (And actually, I don't think the two can usefully be separated or disconnected from each other anyway.)

In Victorian times, Lewis Henry Morgan, an early and influential evolutionary anthropologist considered promiscuity to be "the lowest conceivable stage of barbarism in which mankind could be found". But Europe's great men - the explorers, the conquerors - had already returned with tales of harems and geishas, forever exoticising and idealising polygamy - or more specifically polygyny - in the Western male erotic imagination. Even simple prostitution became an act of male connoisseurship, not least because purchasing the services of a call-girl versus a street hooker is considered a marker of class and morals - perhaps most notably if gentlemen are seen to be slumming or if prostitution involves rescue. So it's against this backdrop that any story of plural marriage or polyamory necessarily takes shape, and my interest lies specifically in the historical tendency towards polygyny rather than polyandry, and how this shapes the lives of women.

In Big Love, the audience is encouraged to sympathise with - if not overtly condone - the type of polygyny practiced by Bill's family, and to disapprove of - if not overtly condemn - the kind of polygyny practiced by Roman's family. Bill is presented as a good man, a kind man, a man who loves - and is loved by - Barb, Nicki, Margene and their seven children. In Bill's family, plural marriage is seen to be a worthwhile struggle for everyone. On the other hand, Roman is presented as powerful but corrupt and abusive, an older man with 17 wives, 31 children and 187 grandchildren. This plural marriage manifests itself most poignantly in the bitter defeat of his fourth wife Adaleen, the dubious circumstances under which Bill married Roman and Adaleen's daughter Nicki, and the righteous manipulations of 14-year-old wife-to-be Rhonda.

Of course, it's not quite that simple. In Big Love, polygamy - like any kind of social relationship - involves shifting relations of power. The audience witnesses Bill's benefits as patriarch, and his burdens. The women are in turn victimised and powerful, admirable and pathetic. We are introduced to characters who blindly submit to the practice, others who struggle to make it work, some who are ambivalent, and others still who openly condemn it. The characters and their values compete and cooperate with each other. And despite the richness of everyday experiences afforded to these people, not once does polygamy appear to be 'normal'. Even its most banal expressions take place within an always broader context of conflicting values and experiences.

In each episode we get a glimpse of how isolating the polygamist lifestyle can be. Where polygamy is illegal, the first wife and her children are the only family that can be publically recognised. This means that as second and third wives, Nicki and Margene can only exert their power as wives and mothers in private or domestic settings, and this seems to compel Nicki to treacheries and Margie to intimacies that put the whole family at risk. Everyone is constantly looking out for neighbours and co-workers that would report them to the police, and social interactions are almost exclusively limited to those within the family. (This sense of inclusion also relies on the exclusion of their extended families.) It's impossible to forget while you watch Big Love that these polygamous lives are playing out where monogamy predominates, and so it often seems a sad and lonely life.

Take the episode in which Bill and his first wife Barb have an affair. According to a schedule the wives collectively agree upon, Bill spends one day (and one day only) with each wife in rotation. This allows for some sort of temporary monogamy, which also forms sub-family groupings within the larger family structure. These boundaries within the family are both physical (each wife has her own house) and social (no sex with Bill in another wife's house or during another wife's time) . So when Bill and Barb start seeing each other outside the schedule, and Barb confesses her excitement to a polygamous girlfriend, the friend plainly counsels against getting her hopes up because Bill isn't going to leave his wives for her. (This kind of conservative polygamy should be distinguished from, say, more liberal forms of monogamous swinging or group sex in hetero porn, I think.)

In the third episode, there's a brilliant scene between young bride-to-be Rhonda, and Bill and Barb's 16-year-old daughter Sarah. Sarah asks Rhonda what it's like to be married, and Rhonda corrects her by saying it's just a "pre-marriage placement" to get around the law until she's 16. She insists that she wasn't forced and that Roman is nice to her - which reassures Sarah and the audience that this isn't a case of pedophilia or child abuse. Then she comments, with a knowing smile, on how much the other wives envy the attention she gets because she's younger and prettier. When Sarah remains sceptical, Rhonda calmly states that "the greatest freedom we have is obedience" and I almost fall out of my chair. (Because it's true - and that horrifies me. Even when I know that conformity is not always a problem, I don't admire it. As you can probably imagine, this leads to several political and ethical constraints that I wouldn't otherwise support, but there you have it.)

Now I look forward to watching Big Love because I find all the female characters to be utterly believable, if not always likeable, and that's a pretty rare and beautiful thing in my experience. Barb breaks my heart and Nicki makes me angry. Sarah's character may be the only one I really identify with, and I probably like Bill's mother Lois and his third wife Margie the most because they seem the most excessive or difficult to contain. In any case, these women demonstrate more complexity of character than I have seen on any screen in a long time. And if we've ever wondered what it would be like to slip out of our monogamous bindings, their stories probably offer more truths than we might want to believe. Damn good stuff.

Miracles

The Miracle of Cephalopodization

"The cephalopods, formless, tentacled animals, are a significant incarnation of the monsters that tend to symbolize the spirits of the infernal regions. Their ink represents darkness. But used as a culinary ingredient, the fluid also makes for a magnificent sauce used in flavouring paellas and other rice dishes. The Nootka Indians of Vancouver believe that the squid was the first to possess the secret of fire. As the lore goes, several Nootka warriors stole this secret from the creature; the squid subsequently took legal action, but the judicial system was exasperatingly slow and the squid turned into a jellyfish, or medusa. In all known cosmogonies the medusa has bared a negative reputation; it is antisocial, aggressive, and goes hysterical whenever someone enters its den. With its head ringed of serpents, the mere sight of the Gorgon was enough to turn an enemy to stone. The jellyfish provided H. R. Geiger with the inspiration for his Alien, and Vilém Flusser for his Vampiroteutus Infernalis. At Valhamönde Senator Tessek directed the miracle of cephalopod transmutation as a transition to a distorted image of the self, although this is denied by Judaism, Christianity and Islam, which all favour a linear rather than a cycli

Posted by geminimay_no 08:03 | Shocking | Comment(2) | Permalink

Shocking But True - A MUST VIEW POST!

14 April, 2007

Friday, April 28

I txt, therefore I am

As part of Carleton's Enrichment Mini-Course Program, I'm super excited about getting to spend all next week with a bunch of grade 8 and 9 students investigating mobile phones and everyday life.

You can see what we'll be up to in the i txt, therefore i am blog.

At what point does collaboration cease to be reciprocal and simply become appropriation?

When I started blogging my research four years ago, I remember running into other academics both online and offline who thought it wasn't a good idea to share my findings so freely. I remember thinking how sad it was that they were so attached to the idea of intellectual property and their own career advancement. I've since abandoned such self-righteousness, but stand behind my desire to be the kind of academic who shared everything - what I read, what I thought, what I wrote.

I wanted other academics to borrow and build on my work. I trusted them to give credit where credit was due, to return the favour by sharing their own research. And you know what? They did. They do. I haven't lost control of my research and I've had the absolute pleasure of getting to work with, and learn from, some really incredible scholars.

But I didn't start blogging just for other academics. I had lofty - if terribly naive - dreams of becoming some sort of public intellectual. I wanted to exceed the fortifications of the Ivory Tower with every post, damn it! I wanted to give back as much as I could to the people who had funded my research. I wanted to be held accountable.

I especially wanted to learn from non-academics, and share with them what I had learned from my own encounters. I was attracted to the cultures of collaboration and sharing I witnessed online. I found kindred spirits and made friends who have been instrumental in shaping my thinking and writing. It's been good, for sure, but I've also learned an important lesson: not everyone understands or values reciprocity in the same ways. In other words, not all sharing is created equal. At first I thought it was simply a case of some people taking more than they give. But now I think it's more than that: I think it's a cultural difference.

I've written many times, here and elsewhere, that I question the kind of reciprocity at work when a small group of people profit from the work of many others. (And don't even get me started on individuals who profit from the not-for-profit work conducted by academics and others, and that includes accumulating and leveraging social capital from recommendations and the like.)

In the past I would have considered these things amongst the ill effects of capitalism, but now I think it's a bit more complicated than that. After all, some of this labour is actually being done for free. Out of love even, like with Flickr or any number of mod communities. The DIY ethic, in fact, is based on the power of creative re-use and re-appropriation. But these terms are now being tossed around in software and hardware development like organisations and companies only care about democratic participation, and not profitability.

Jean Burgess knows much more about mass amateurisation and vernacular creativity than I do, so I hope she can help me out here: At what point are labour and love exploited? When does collaboration become appropriation?

Thursday, April 27

The not-so-secret lives of objects

Have You Been Out Today?

The Life of a Pen
"I had an idea a while ago to take one new pen and use it exclusively in a new sketchbook until the last drop of ink had departed its valiant, ragged fibre tip. The pen may not be used outside of its dedicated book and the book may not be marked with any other pen (at least not until this one's dead and gone). No pencilling allowed, no proper work, just aimless doodling like I used to do a lot of but don't so much any more. Them's the rules."

Life of a Pen Page Eight
"Nobly ignoring my prophecies of imminent demise some time ago the pen soldiers on heroically..."

Life of a Pen Page Twelve
"Just getting over a monster cold which may have contributed to the dark tone of this page, though it's at least as much to do with the state of the pen: as it's drying out it lends itself more to scritchy scratchy shading."

Life of a Pen Page Nineteen
"It really must nearly be over now. The fibre tip is worn down to less than 0.5mm long. Maybe the ink will run out first but surely another page or two will see off the last remains of the tip. In the meantime, it draws on..."

Yesterday: Life of a Pen Page Twenty-Three...

(via)

Wednesday, April 26

Crafting design

"I think the radicalness of design has everything to do with the ability to engage participation. What if design were used as a tool for civic discourse? What if it produced unrest, dissatisfaction with things as they are? What if it were used to engage people, even stirring them to the point of anger? If you don't like the rules of the game, it's your responsibility to break them. Use the democratic process to bring a hell of a lot of people with you."

- Maurice Cox

This and more interesting discussion around the relationships between design and craft at Core 77: Radical Craft: The Second Art Center Design Conference

The connection between craft and design also reminds me of Andrea Tung's Making Things blog, in which she expresses herself as fashion designer, crafty knitter, yarn-marker, fibre designer and entrepreneur - all by way of gorgeous things (like Sandra Backlund's clothes).

It's a Ray Fenwick day

If it weren't for The Hall of Best Knowledge I don't know how I'd make it through some teaching experiences. Imagine the things that students say. After final grades are assigned. (Click for larger image.)

Tuesday, April 25

Unintended feminisms?

I don't think I'd find this hooked rug anywhere near as compelling if it weren't photographed in use - but there's just something properly perverse about a dark-haired domestic worker vaccuuming over the breasts of a blond porno chick.

from soft porn art by whitney lee (via)

Towards mobile space as feminine space

Molly Steenson's research at Yale School of Architecture is shaping up very nicely. Her first thesis-related paper is a bit of a jumble of ideas, but The Excitable Crowd: Characterizing Social, Mobile Space (pdf) starts with this interesting question: "Where mobile technology is concerned, might mobility be more feminine than masculine?"

I've long argued that mobility and flow are feminine in their voluptuousness and leakages, and I think it's great that Molly is challenging the idea that technologies are always already masculine. The first part of the essay takes a closer look at how women use mobile phones to feel secure in urban spaces. Molly discusses a UK ad campaign that warns women against showing off their phones in public because it draws thieves, and she wonders what effect that might have on women who show off their phones precisely as a means of creating personal space and security. It's a good question, but I think the matter of risk has to be better sorted before this argument can go any further. For example, how are mobile technologies active in creating and maintaining these urban risks? How do we make arguments for feminised/feminist spaces and technologies that avoid at-risk or potential-victim characterisations of women?

Molly goes on to discuss how Japanese women and girls use their mobile phones to create personal space in public, but it's not clear to me how phones are cute and subversive when they use them but creepy and oppressive when older men use them. I wonder how they are complicit in the creation and maintenance of certain urban risks - it seems a bit off that women and girls have the power to protect themselves from a threat that only they are able to create. I'm not sure that De Certeau would consider that a good tactic! But I haven't read Kenichi Fujimoto's article so maybe I'm missing the whole point.

The next example of how mobile spaces and technologies are feminine involves Molly's discussion of what has been called 'micro-organisation' and 'hyper-organisation'. She points out that women tend to use their mobile phones for social networking - staying in touch with friends and family, arranging meetings, etc. - more than men do. Molly argues that mobile technologies and services have been instrumental in creating and maintaining social capital in urban spaces, and that much of this social capital is being accumulated by, and shared between, women. Very interesting, but again I think the question of social capital deserves greater exploration, especially since the first truly ubiquitous locative or mobile media will most likely be some form of advertising, and this may only better position women as consumers. The desire to create instruments or devices that coordinate and organise our lives has also always been a part of feminist critiques of science and technology, and Molly's example raises questions about what kind of feminism only masters or reappropriates masculine designs.

The final part of Molly's argument addresses how women are using mobile phones in non-industrialised countries. She takes the idea of social capital and argues that it can help put financial capital into the hands of poor women through 'micro-entrepreneurship' practices. (Molly, have you checked out Bourdieu on the kinds and conversions of capital?) I have to admit that I'm highly sceptical of technology in development - especially because it almost always starts with a disclaimer that technology can not fix the world. But Molly raises some good points, and I think we're still really struggling to understand emerging international economies and organisations so open engagement is crucial.

Needless to say, I got all giddy when the paper turned to spatial and cultural theory, although this is probably the section I'm hardest on. Molly defines her understanding of architecture and mobility along the lines of Lefebvre, De Certeau and Latour: space as practice, production and representation. I'm not sure I follow her interpretation of Lefebvre's space of production - she seems to mobilise a network metaphor where I think a protocol metaphor would be much more appropriate. But I was super happy to be reminded of the idea that maps (Lefebvre's representations of space) "will eventually be broken up by the inconsistencies of the governing rules of spatial practice". Nonetheless, I also think her interpretation of representational space requires a little more critical reflection. If it is indeed a sort of field-of-play, it's worthwhile to look at Bourdieu's fields and note how they differ from networks or flows, and to assess the political (as well as gendered) implications.

Moving on to De Certeau, Molly calls on his concepts of strategies and tactics to understand spatial practice, and makes explicit the political dimensions that were a bit overlooked in her use of Lefebvre. This section could have provided a way to flesh out some of her assumptions about space, gender and power but she does argue that "in mobility, the tactic claims space by doing what the strategy does not expect" and we've ultimately got mobility as anti-structure or hybrid space (which has consequences for any argument involving masculine OR feminine concepts). So enter Latour, and Molly extends hybrid space to include networks and assemblies. However, she calls upon his dingpolitik, without actually discussing the political implications and their connections to Lefebvre and De Certeau. The paper then ends rather abruptly as Molly raises the tendency towards universal explanations of space in the works of Lefebvre and Deleuze, and wonders if notions of mobile space either challenge or uphold them. The reader is left with the Big Question: "what is mobile space?" and I guess we'll find out what she thinks when her thesis is done.

There are some really great kernels of ideas here, but I expected the paper to ask more questions in order to give the reader a sense of what the broader thesis project was actually going to address. As it stands, I'm neither sure of where she stands, nor where she wants to go. (Maybe it would have helped if all the theoretical discussion came first and each of the examples applied these ways of thinking and actually offered critiques?) But she's definitely doing something right and I definitely want to stay along for the ride!

Now, all I want to know is why she chose that title ... Mobile vulgus indeed ;)

RIP Raúl Corrales

Dos trabucos, 1960

"When there is no longer misery in Cuba, you’re going to starve to death."

- Alberto Korda to Raúl Corrales

Machine guns and jackhammers

Extreme Craft sez: "Theresa Honeywell is tougher than you. Her work reflects her interests in the 'manly arts' with a feminine twist." Damn straight.

(via)

Monday, April 24

Big Love!

Friday, April 21

The line between fiction and fact

Pi Patel and Richard Parker being hit by flying fishes

"Words, processed, become images; images, processed, become words. A neat, essential balance, whose fulcrum is the versatile eye."
- Yann Martel

Tomislav Torjanac won the competition, but I still think Andrea Offermann best captured the book's peculiar intensities.

Thursday, April 20

Technology, sex and bugs, Or, Blessed be the religious scholars

Trevor - Do you think I have any chance of scoring a position in a divinity school or religious studies department? Then I could work with people like you and Jeremy Biles on virtuality and fetishism in new technologies...

I mean, check out "I, Insect, or Bataille and the Crush Freaks" (pdf)

It's a brilliant look at bug-crushing* as part atrocity exhibition and part technophilia:

"It is not difficult to see why insects make such apt metaphors for technology. Their highly organized labor, machine-like movements, and apparently imputrescible exoskeletons all liken them to machines. Moreover, the virtual indistinguishability to the human eye of, say, one ant from another in a colony perfectly describes the anxiety-provoking typicality associated with the increasing intimacy of humans and machines. This living metaphor has thus become a metaphor for vital declivity; the insect, a symbol of the machine, is also the machinic harbinger of death. The movement from organic to mechanical is literalized in the many recent occasions of technology mimicking insects, as in the mounting production of entomorphic robots. If the insect is a metaphor for machinery, it is now also its literal embodiment–both a model of technology, and a model for technology ...

This fetish operates on the literalization of the bug-machine analogy, and allows the crush freak to master the anxieties produced by machine culture through an indulgence in the ecstasies of technology ... Serial violence, spectacularly executed and compulsively reproduced, not only reenacts the violent penetration of the body or psyche by external forces; at the same time it grants what it had first sought to suture up: open interiors, visible insides–thus an evacuation of innards that would otherwise remain vacuous, meaningless ...

In my discussion of Bataille, I pointed out that sacrificial killing and perverse sexuality elicit a bursting of the boundaries that define the self, and that in masochistically identifying with the victim or the other, the sacrificer/lover participates in a form of non-productive expenditure, an explosive depletion of the self. Following these same lines, Vilencia’s perverse rites, combining sexual pleasure and death, at once assume and transgress normal, or normative, sexual behavior, predicated on reproduction. Indeed, it is in recording his insect sacrifices that Vilencia is able to reconfigure sexual reproduction as mechanical reproduction; thus 'Squish Productions' treats copulation as commerce–a sterile productivity at once profitable and perverse."

* Some crush freaks prefer frogs or cute rodents and I think that's cruel. Not that I think it's okay to kill bugs, but it is less offensive to me.

(hunted down after reading this post at textually)

From the archives:
What socio-technology can learn from theology (Jan 04)
Prayer is taking place, or, Becoming together (Apr 06)

Sweet!

Look for Julie Kientz and friends next to the CHI registration tables, or better yet, contact her if you wanna get in on the action!

(thanks danah)

Wednesday, April 19

No maggot lonely

"He is the most courageous, remorseless writer going, and the more he grinds my nose in the shit, the more I am grateful to him. He's not fucking me about, he's not leading me up any garden path, he's not slipping me a wink, he's not flogging me a remedy or a path or a revelation or a basinful of breadcrumbs, he's not selling me anything I don't want to buy — he doesn't give a bollock whether I buy or not — he hasn't got his hand over his heart. Well, I'll buy his goods, hook, line and sinker, because he leaves no stone unturned and no maggot lonely. He brings forth a body of beauty."

- Harold Pinter on Samuel Beckett

Tuesday, April 18

Wi-Fi by the people, for the people?

So I'm trying to get my thoughts together on wireless community access, citizen-oriented content and public authoring.

IFTF's Anthony Townsend recently posted on guaranteeing citizens’ role as content providers:

The directions of current municipal projects...are unwittingly viewing the wireless network as a means to escape local communities, and as a one-way street for advertisers to subsidize the network’s operating costs. Therefore, in order to guarantee that municipal wireless networks will enhance citizen’s roles as content providers, cities should:

• Require that wireless franchisees provide significant community access to wireless captive portal pages and splash pages. Ownership, control and access to this resource can be organized in any number of ways – having local students document and chronicle local events and other open content authoring models.

• Cities should demand access to any future advertising channel deployed on ad-supported municipal networks for public service announcement-type content.

I have no idea what he means by "a means to escape local communities" but the advertising bit seems straight forward and expected. It also strikes me as rather obvious that community access should be part of any telecommunications infrastructure discussion: this is, after all, a question of technological citizenship and we still need to address the politics and ethics of 'allowing' others to speak.

But much more interesting to me are comments by Michael Lenczner of Montreal-based community-wireless project Île Sans Fil . He's worried about the effect of ISF and has some interesting thoughts on how access does not = good. Michael also points to the value of non-technologised public spaces such as Concordia's University of the Streets. And Ulises Mejias makes some crucial observations about the commodification and management of social knowledge that deserve further exploration.

See also:

Langdon Winner on Technological Euphoria and Contemporary Citizenship
Leah Bradshaw on Technology and Political Education
Graham Longford on Pedagogies of Digital Citizenship and the Politics of Code

By Any Media Necessary

The Upgrade! Montréal - Tactical Media
Hexagram - UQAM – 209 Ste-Catherine E.
April 27th, 2006

"A show-and-tell on tactical media & tactical art, where practitioners work in-between art and politics in order to momentarily occupy and infiltrate structures of mass media & culture."

As if missing CHI weren't bad enough, here's another reason to be disappointed that I can't afford to go to Montréal next week. Sigh.

Monday, April 17

A visual education too

"Inexpensive Penguins provided a crash course in world literature and the publisher's Pelicans told you everything you might need to know about history, politics, sociology and film. The remarkable thing about these paperbacks is that they offered a visual education, too."

From Underneath the covers

Also:

Penguin By Design: A Cover Story 1935-2005
V&A - 70 Years of Penguin Design
Happy Birthday Penguin
Penguin Classics history

Allow us to judge a book by its cover
"Those who revere first editions and pretty covers, who worry about sun damage to spines and despise pencil notes in margins, are courtly lovers. Those who split open books as if they were ripe fruit, who dog-ear pages and use paperbacks as table mats, are carnal lovers."

updated 18.04.06

Thursday, April 13

Design critique

Great article by Rick Poynor in the March issue of icon: The Death of the Critic

In assessing the current state of design criticism (not design journalism), he takes a look at three different kinds of design criticism as well as what I would call design critique. From my perspective, there are several differences, but the crucial one is that design criticism comes from within the practice and design critique comes from outsiders. As Poynor explains:

"The final category of criticism takes a more questioning and sometimes even hostile view of the subject. This is the cultural studies approach. It treats cultural production as a form of evidence, taking these phenomena apart to discover what they reveal about society, and viewing the subject matter through particular lenses: feminism, racism, consumerism, sustainability. Design, as a primarily commercial endeavour, makes a particularly good subject for this type of analysis and unmasking. The problem, from a designer's point of view, is that this form of design commentary can be deeply sceptical about many things that a working professional takes for granted. Designers who read it are often confronted with two bald alternatives: feel bad about what you are doing or change your ways. Combative, campaigning criticism - Naomi Klein's No Logo is the best known recent example - is more likely to come from outside the design world."

Brilliant - I finally understand why some designers get so pissed off with me. And if this is what it means to be arrogant and elitist, I renew my commitment to design critique! Just kidding. But that idea points at something of particular interest to me: how individual and cultural differences get negotiated.

I mean, clearly I stand behind being sceptical rather than taking things for granted, and clearly I believe that critical thinking is a fundamental skill for everyday life. Put otherwise, I believe that life is political. I ask myself and my students who we want to be at the end of the day, and if we're willing to accept the consequences of our decisions. I especially value critique when it compels people (including me) to strongly react and defend against change. I believe it is always already more constructive than de(con)structive. In my mind, it isn't about guilt, shame or feeling bad about what we do--it's about honesty, compassion and responsibility. But I seriously object to certain business practices that seem to channel current design and design-thinking, and I know there are designers out there who agree. What seems to be lacking though is any sort of shared commitment to actually do something about it. To change the ways we teach our students, the ways we manage our projects and teams, the goals our businesses and organisations set...

Take Poynor's comments on Ian Nairn's 1955 Outrage issue of the Architectural Review:

"What is remarkable about Outrage is its controlled anger and passion. The purpose of criticism here is to force open people's eyes, to change opinion and make a difference...To produce a scorching critique like this you need profound idealism and a shared sense of what matters, and we have lost this now...Many people find it harder to feel such a keen sense of outrage today because they have ceased to believe that it's likely to have much effect. What counts is to find ways of accommodating things as they are and of making whatever practical interventions you can lever, though these aren't expected to bring about fundamental change."

Is this true? Is today's outrage only another commodity? Have critiques been replaced by catalogues and congratulations?

Poynor concludes:

"I would say we have a problem. We desperately need criticism. It's a vital part of the development of any creative discipline. It helps to shape the way practitioners think about their work and it plays a crucial role in fostering critical reflection among design students. Conducted convincingly, design criticism might even establish design in the public's consciousness - at last - as an activity that has a little more to it than dreaming up cool things to buy in the shops."

Hear hear! And while we're at it, how do 'by-and-for the people' technologies and media help to construct who 'the people' actually are and what they can do? Who benefits from this and in which ways?

(article via Design Observer)

Quote of the day

creativity/machine:

"We have a lot to learn from the practices of late adopters, as well as those of the thoughtful, the sceptical, and the reluctant. We should watch them. We should listen."

Actually, the whole post is interesting, and this reminds me that when I finally have the means to start my Slow Project, Jean is the first person I'll recruit.