Civic City Cahier 3: Distributed Agency, Design's Potential

Civic City Cahier 3 Tom Holert Distributed Agency, Design’s Potentiality

Bedford Press

A city is no longer comprised only of buildings, streets, squares and parks.

Text and images in public space, branding campaigns, street art, guidance systems, temporary installations and cartographic representations also influence our use, experience and perception of the city, as do signage, urban furnishings, vehicles and the appearance of public facades. The Civic City Cahier series addresses these design practices in light of the escalating crisis of neoliberalism.

Global cities (and their designs in particular) have rested on the paradigm of marketdriven development, and have been interpreted as strategic spaces of neoliberal restructuring. Whilst they are now hit by the crisis of this ideology, the opportunity and necessity to imagine another, more social city has also opened up.

Yet designers continue to hold back criticism

and proposals. However, it is time to redefine the role of design for a social city—and take action.

What is the role of design in the production of urban space? Does it wish to be merely an element in the commodified colonisation of social spaces? Or are design and the visual and physical representations of urban issues themselves the key means by which a Civic City may be created from the ideological ruins of existing urban spaces?

The Civic City Cahier series is also the result of and working material for the ongoing postgraduate and research programme ‘Civic City’ at the Institute for Design Research Design2context at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK).

The programme is run by Ruedi Baur, Miguel Robles-Duran, Matthias Görlich and Jesko Fezer.

Civic City Cahier 3 Tom Holert Distributed Agency, Design’s Potentiality

Tom Holert Civic City Cahier 3: Distributed Agency, Design’s Potentiality Published by Bedford Press Foreword by Jesko Fezer and Matthias Görlich Series Editors: Design2context, Jesko Fezer, Matthias Görlich Copy Editor: Matthew Evans Design: Studio Görlich Type Modification: Last Minute Panic Visual Statement: Project Projects

© 2011 Bedford Press and the authors.

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

ISBN: 978-1-907414-12-1

Bedford Press AA Publications Ltd. 36 Bedford Square London WC1B 3ES www.bedfordpress.org Bedford Press is an imprint of AA Publications Ltd., which is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Architectural Assciation (Inc.) Registered Charity No. 311083 .

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Registered office as above.

The Civic City Cahier series has been initiated

by Institute Design2context, Civic City Program, Zurich University of the Arts.

Visual Statement Project Projects ........................... 7 Foreword Matthias Görlich and Jesko Fezer................................... 9 Distributed Agency, Design’s Potentiality Tom Holert................................... 11 Biography..................................... 58

Visual Statement “After reading and re-reading the text, we were drawn to one quote by Mr Keedy: ‘…Stop pretending you’re an artist, because you’re not.’ Holert’s text critiques contemporary design that subscribes to an overvalued idea of its own autonomy.

While we are proponents of graphic design as an editorial and curatorial practice, we find the ‘designer as author’ or ‘designer as artist’ approach quite questionable.

As such, we would like to take advantage of the authorial context of this Civic City Cahier invitation to propose, paradoxically, a distributed intervention within the book structure itself.”

Email by Project Projects, New York

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Hurray to Design Matthias Görlich & Jesko Fezer A ‘no to design’ as an option proclaimed by Margit Mayer and us in the first issue of the Civic City Cahiers is now turned upside down—or let’s say extended—by Tom Holert. By questioning two problematic assumptions which seem unchallenged by the current design discourse, he opens the debate up for a more euphoric perspective. Holert first defines design as a networked inter-subjective form of action, wresting it from the classical understanding of authorship. From this he deduces a very particular form of social and political responsibility that could run contrary to the strategy of lament and refusal, to which the authors of design are condemned.

Regarding design as something capable to enable, excavate and generate the possible, instead of regretting its fatal political dependency and entanglement, makes imaginable another model of a politics of design. Design could become a ‘discipline of un-disciplinary moves and motions’ and turn itself ‘into a practice of possibility and an articulation of becoming’.

Instead of stubborn refusal or direct confrontation with the repressive conditions and effects of neoliberalism, Holert asks for a perspective that overrides capitalism as enemy. So if we define design as a tool and if we embrace its capacity on a micropolitical level to intervene into the local and social specificities, if we acknowledge difference—not as distinction, but as struggle—can we then affirm to design in a new way (as at least another option)? Challenging design itself in its omnipresence, incorporating any form of (cultural) production in a capitalistic as well as post-capitalistic world, would mean challenging the system itself.

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Tom Holert Distributed Agency, Design’s Potentiality

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Parts of this essay were written for the conference “Design for the Post-Neoliberal City,” organised by Jesko Fezer and Matthias Görlich for Civic City/Design 2Context, ZHdK, Zurich, March 12–13, 2010; other elements are cited from Tom Holert, “Design and Nervousness”, trans. Gerrit Jackson, Texte zur Kunst, no. 72 (December 2008). A version of the text, copyedited by Brian Kuan Wood and titled “Hidden Labor and the Delight of Otherness: Design and Post-Capitalist Politics”, appeared in e-flux journal, no. 17 (June 2010), which focuses on “The Post-Capitalist Self,” and was guestedited by Marion von Osten.

Ritualistic Negativity and the Materialism of the Banal What could it mean to reframe, or even imagine, cultural and aesthetic practices in decidedly post-capitalist terms— that is, as embedded in and engendered by processes of globally networked solidarity, diversity, cooperation, interdependence, and so forth? I would like to begin by supplementing the notion of practice with the notion of design, which may provide the discussion with an initial spin. Of course, ‘design’ is a contested term, and its meaning and function can differ dramatically depending on ideological claims and institutional interests. The very notion of ‘design’, not to mention the ideologies and machinations implied in design-driven modes of problem-solving that operate as potential disciplining force, are most questionable. Moreover, the logic of design is being mixed and modulated to

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Tom Holert is an art historian and critic who occasionally slips into the role of cultural producer.

Having studied in Hamburg and Paris, he received his Ph.D. in art history at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University at Frankfurt am Main.

A former editor of Texte zur Kunst and Spex, he currently teaches and conducts research at the Centre for Art/Knowledge (CAK) at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.

Among his books are Imagineering. Visuelle Kultur und Politik der Sichtbarkeit (König, 2000, ed.), Entsichert.

Krieg als Massenkultur im 21. Jahrhundert (Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2002, co-authored with Mark Terkessidis), Fliehkraft. Gesellschaft in Bewegung—von Migranten und Touristen (Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2006, coauthored with Mark Terkessidis), Marc Camille Chaimowicz: Celebration? Realife (MIT Press, 2007), Regieren im Bildraum (B-Books, 2008) and

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Das Erziehungsbild.

Zur visuellen Kultur des Pädagogischen (Schlebrügge.Editor, 2010, co-edited with Marion von Osten).

Holert is currently preparing book-length studies on didactic and research modes in the visual arts of the 1960s and 1970s (“Claiming Knowledge”) and on the visual history of experimental psychology and pedagogy (“The Diagnostic Modern”).

Civic City Cahier Series: Margit Mayer Civic City Cahier 1: Social Movements in the (Post-)Neoliberal City Gui Bonsiepe Civic City Cahier 2: Design and Democracy Tom Holert Civic City Cahier 3: Distributed Agency, Design’s Potentiality Neil Brenner, Jamie Peck and Nik Theodore Civic City Cahier 4: Afterlives of Neoliberalism Erik Swyngedouw Civic City Cahier 5: Designing the Post-Political City and the Insurgent Polis

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