Here is the hypothesis which I would like to put forward tonight in order to fix

the terrain or perhaps the very provisional theatre of the work I am doing:
that in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected,
organised and redistributed by a certain number of procedures whose role is to
ward off its powers and dangers, to gain mastery over its chance events, to
evade its ponderous, formidable materiality.

The quote just read and now visible behind me is, as you may or may not know, from Michel
Foucaults The Order of Discourse, his inaugural lecture at Collge de France given in
December 1970. Opening his lecture Foucault wishes that he had just been able to slip in to
the discourse, to the talk, he is about to give. I am obviously, as you can already see and are
about to here, not Foucault. But the desire to simply slip into discourse unites us and perhaps
you as well. Desire, however, is a trickster. As you might have already noted from the
presentation of the talk I have now started to give, I desire something beyond a simple slip
into discourse (which of course is also what Foucault is after).

In the brief presentation of my talk I wrote that Notions of critical practice and its supposed
possibilities is an oft called for trope in the designing disciplines based on the understanding
of designs possibility to act as an agent of social and political change. I even argued that
these kinds of covert undertakings have proven themself a failure due to our historical
predicament defined by the void of self-critique and the omnipresent ideo-logic of late
capitalism and that the idea of designs possibility to act as an agent of social and political
change is partly grounded in what architectural (and design) historian Manfredo Tafuri once
referred to as anachronistic hopes in design.

Why this polemic desire? Why do I whish to confront and criticize the designing disciplines
will to act as agent of social and political change? Do they even or am I creating a
strawman argument here? Why engage in a critique of a will to act for change of a destructive
status quo, a critique that at best is only inhibiting? Is it not to prefer to Fail again and fail
better then not to act (and fail) at all. And what does this have to do with my publishing
activities, the capacity of which I am invited to speak here. I whish I had a simple answer to
these questions but I dont. However, I hope that you will help me in finding some of the
answers and also that you bare with me in my intentionally sketchy address.

1
I do, however, have a preliminary answer to the question of why I have chosen this path.
I do this in order to address the aim of this course, of Organising Discourse, to support and
invigorate the development of new conceptual and physical spaces for presentation and
display, meetings, discussions and debate, research and modes of production, etc. and its
focus on critical practice. This aim raise to me a question that I think is of some importance,
a question that can be formulated as what is a critical practice in relation to the development
of new conceptual and physical spaces for presentation and display. To answer this
question, something that I can already now reveal that I will fail in, I think it is of importance
to look into the conditions under which this critical practice, in relation to the development
of new conceptual and physical spaces for presentation and display, is to be organised. I
will do this in quite an open and unfinished manner, partly due to my own shortcoming, partly
due to the complexity of the questions pointed at.

For some time now, however, this form of critique as been expelled from the discourse
organising the art and designing disciplines, partly due to its supposedly inhibiting effect.
Much as I do understand this turn away from critique I am not willing to subscribe to it. In
this I agree with Hal Foster stating that: I understand the fatigue that many feel with the
negativity of critique, its presumption of authority, its sheer out-of-date-ness in a world-that-
couldnt-care-less. And, as Foster continues to note: One often becomes a critic or a
historian for the same reason that one often becomes an artist or an architect out of
discontent with the status quo and a desire for alternatives. There are no alternatives without
critique.

In his address upon receiving the 2008 Holberg Prize, Fredric Jameson noted how today it is
the postmodern gestalt of the curator that organises aesthetic perception and practice, that
directs aesthetic perception and practice, and thus organises a model for the aesthetization of
everyday life in general. What does this mean? What are the implications of such a
development in relation to everyday life, to art, to design to the political realm, to the
practices we are engaged in?

Turning to Jameson we must remember his distinction between postmodernism and

postmodernity. While postmodernism is a style, postmodernity is what he calls a category of
periodization, that is a historical period equivalent to the third stage of capitalism, late- or
latest capitalism, globalisation, post-Fordism, and concepts alike.

2
My foci is however not so much what differs postmodernism from postmodernity but how
postmodernity differs from modernity in relation to the different forms of perceptions,
practices and sensibilities that each of these historical periods give raise to but, and this is
important, also what underpins them. Thus I will start of by a historical reflection that mirrors
some contemporary assumptions on what the world of objects of the designed and built,
published or by other means produced amounts to with regards to shaping subjectivity as
well as society.

But before doing so I would like to make a brief note on the concept of ideology that as a
critique of ideology is what I am about to engage in is of importance to my talk here. As the
concept of ideology itself is grounded in different ideological formations think about for
instance the many meanings this concept has had within the Marxist tradition over the last
hundred years I would like to use a definition of the concept that emerges from a
quantitative analyses of the concept performed by Malcom B. Hamilton in the late eighties. It
reads as follows:
An ideology is a system of collectively held normative and reputedly factual ideas and
beliefs and attitudes advocating a particular pattern of social relationships and
arrangements, and/or aimed at justifying a particular pattern of conduct, which its
proponents seek to promote, realise, pursue or maintain (The Elements of the
Concept of Ideology, 38).
With this in mind I, following Manfredo Tafuri, would like to argue that many of the attempts
of organising discourse by the historical as well as contemporary avant-gardes of art,
architecture, and design over the last hundred years fit all to well into the definition of
ideology, not only repeating it but also reinforcing it, however in slightly different forms. To
Tafuri this meant that there cannot be a class aesthetic, art or architecture but only a class
criticism of the aesthetic, of art, of architecture.

Just as the historical avant-garde to Tafuri took on the role of bridging the gap, of healing the
wound, produced by the force of capitalism in its different historical shapes, the contemporary
avant-gardes of late capitalism might be said do just the same.

Let me now, after this lengthy however necessary introduction, turn to the conditions of
critical practice.

3
Producing
We live for the most part in closed rooms. These form the environment from
which our culture grows. Our culture is to a certain extent the product of our
architecture. If we want our culture to rise to a higher level, we are obliged, for
better or for worse, to change our architecture. And this only becomes possible
if we take away the closed character from the rooms in which we live. We can
only do that by introducing glass architecture, which lets in the light of the sun,
the moon, and the stars, not merely through a few windows, but through every
possible wall, which will be made entirely of glass of coloured glass. The new
environment, which we thus create, must bring us a new culture.

Celebrating its 100th anniversary this year German author Paul Scherbaarts Glass
Architecture (first published as Glasarchitektur by Verlag der Sturm in 1914) has become an
often referred to manifesto from the heydays of the historical avant-garde. The book consist
of a total of 111 paragraphs, where the one I just read, titled Environment and its influence
on the development of culture, is the first.

To Walter Benjamin, in Experience and Poverty, Scherbaarts novel leads to a discussion of

barbarianism and poverty that are not easily grasped in its intentions. The emerging
barbarianism is to Benjamin an effect of a poverty of experience as a result of the
development of technology a development that he means has a profound effect as a
completely new poverty has descended on mankind.1 To Benjamin the poverty of the
barbarian does not only, however, signify a loss but also acts as a new beginning.
Barbarianism? He questions. Yes, indeed. He answers, and continues: We say this in
order to introduce a new, positive concept of barbarianism. For what does poverty of
experience do for the barbarian? It forces him to start from scratch; to make a new start; to
make a little go a long way; to begin with a little and build up further, looking neither left nor
right.

Ambivalent as Benjamin might be to this development, nothing less than the production of a
new subjectivity and with it, a new mankind, is at stake. The technological development

1
As he writes: Wasnt it noticed at the time how many people returned from the front in silence? Not richer but
poorer in communicable experience?

4
hence does not only add to the growth of capital but also redefines the subject, and the
relations between subjects that is society, that is mankind. So does Scherbaart in his closing
paragraph hope that The new glass environment will completely transform mankind.
In many respects this affirmation of new technologies as a means to transform mankind is
essential not only to the historical avant-garde but to the avant-garde in general the desire
for that which is to come, for that which is fundamentally different from that which is, instils
a revolutionary figure in the practice of the avant-garde as such. This is however, I would like
to suggest, a blind desire, or rather a desire blind for the possible outcome of its urge. An
example of this could have been witnessed at Moderna Museet in Stockholm during the
exhibition Dance Machines. I say could have as the curator had chosen to present for
instance the futurists and constructivists more or less void of their political content and
outspoken political agendas.

To organise discourse in such a manner is surely to direct aesthetic perception and practice
and is so in a rather telling way. Such a depoliticisation and aestheticization presupposes, I
would argue, a shift in understanding of both the objects at hand and the relation between
them that is organised by the curator. A shift that in one way was intrinsic already in
Sherbaarts utopian ideas of the possibility to transform mankind through coloured glass.

Particpating
Forty years and a second world war after Benjamins reflection on experience and poverty in
the wake of the technological development of the early 20th century and the attempts to
transform society by means of design, as for example by the Swedish modern movement
Acceptera!, the aesthetical, political and societal implications of this urge did become visible.
The utopian modernism of the first half of the 20th century with its outspoken will to organise
and form, not only the objects of everyday life, but subjectivity and life as such, did place the
architect/designer/planner/engineer if not at, so at least close to, the helm. A development that
led not only to an aesthetic hegemony but also to an awakening of the role of the designer in
this process.

In relation to this moment of self-critique of the role of the

architect/designer/planner/engineer, I would like to bring to fore a discussion that Jesko Fezer,

5
architect and Professor of Experimental Design at HFBK (Hochschule fr bildende Knste)
Hamburg has brought to my attention.

In September 1971 the Design Research Society organised a conference called Design
Participation. In the proceedings preface Nigel Cross, director of the conference, notes the
following:
Any activity concerned with changing the man-made world can justifiably be
called a design activity. In this respect, most of us are involved in some kind of
designing most of the time. But the really crucial areas of decision-making at
the interface between technology and society are largely the prerogative of
specialist professional designers engineers, planners, architects and industrial
designers. These professions, however, are all currently involved in radical
changes affecting their working methods and their relationships with society
(6).
It is against this background that Rayner Banham in his opening address delivers his critique
of the ways professionals tend to use notions of participation and the supposed
democratization of the design process to their own ends:
[S]o some of us is putting our social consciences to work. We believe, for
social, political, religious reasons, that these things should be done. On the other
hand, it is not too difficult to see that [] the motivation of professionals to stir
up the populace into participatory action has been a way of finding allies for our
own private inter-professional guerilla wars.
What has these two quotes to tell us today, or rather, what questions do these two quotes force
us to pose? I find here several questions still relevant to ask. For instance, what does a far-
reaching statement as Any activity concerned with changing the man-made world can
justifiably be called a design activity imply? What does the observation that crucial areas of
decision-making at the interface between technology and society are largely the prerogative of
specialist professional designers mean to us today that is in a time in which technology has
come to define and produce not only the objects that surrounds us, but the very social fabric
as such?

Interestingly the Design Participation conference paid great attention to the Computer Aided
Design software that emerged at the time. In relation to this Nigel Cross, under the heading
Social Technology, writes that We are, or have been prisoners of the technology of our

6
time. Professionalism is a particular kind of specialisation, and specialisation the division of
labour is the technique of production-line technology. As we develop new technologies we
will develop new roles and new images of our ourselves. With the turn away from the
technique of production-line technology and with this turn the division of labour a new
participatory practice, transgressing the border and bridging g the gap between user and
producer, was hoped for to evolve.

Organising
As we develop new technologies we will develop new roles and new images of our
ourselves. This quote from Nigel Cross I will now boldly suggest could have stood as an
epigraph to Nicolas Bourriauds book Relational Aesthetics. Rightly you will now question
not only my judgement but also my capacity for the most basic cognitive operations. Clearly
relational aesthetic has very little, if any at all, to do with technology. As Bourriaud himself
points out:
Relational aesthetics is part of a materialistic tradition. Being materialistic
does not mean sticking to the triteness of facts [!!!], nor does it imply that sort of
narrow-mindedness that consists in reading works in purely economic terms.
The philosophical tradition that underpins the relational aesthetic was defined in
a noteworthy way by Louis Althusser, in one of his last writings, as
materialism of encounter, or random materialism. This particular materialism
takes as its point of departure the world contingency, which has no pre-existing
origin or sense, nor Reason, which might allot it a purpose. So the essence of
humankind is purely trans-individual, made up of bounds that link individuals
together in social forms that are invariably historical (Marx: the human essence
is the set of social relations).
But if relational aesthetics, as one way of organising discourse, is materialistic in the sense
that it takes as it starting point of departure the world contingency any profound changes to
the world will clearly reflect on relational aesthetics. Thus, if the essence of humankind, our
roles and images of ourselves, transforms as a result of the development of new technologies
so must relational aesthetics. Considering the development of technology over the 15 years
that has passed since Bourriaud first published his book on relational aesthetic we must ask
what this form of organisation of discourse entails today.

7
The End
As now should have becomes clear, a mapping of all the different forms of subjectivities and
sensibilities that technological development as well as other parts of society has witness and
at least in some way experienced throughout the 20th century is a task beyond the scope of this
talk.

I do, however, would like to suggest that such a venture would be a fruitful one. Not
necessarily due to the different forms of technological innovations, medias, gadgets, tools and
means of production, that inform and shape society in such a high degree but as the
technological development also brings with it an ideology, or, as I have suggested elsewhere,
an ideo-logic that permeates all fields of society.

If the historical avant-garde was occupied by the relation between new objects and the subject
and the effect that these had on subjectivity (as in the case of Scheerbart) the contemporary
avant-gardes has expelled, I would like to argue, subjectivity as such from the equation.

For is not the relation between objects, or even relation as such, what most profoundly defines
postmodernity as a historical period? That in order for late capitalism to operate as it does any
form of content has to be nullified or made obsolete, creating but a mere form that can be
substituted and exchanged void of any troublesome grounding qualities as history or
subjectivity?

So in order to support and invigorate the development of new conceptual and physical spaces
for presentation and display, meetings, discussions and debate, research and modes of
production, etc. overarched by the idea of critical practice grounded in a discontent with
the status quo and a desire for alternatives I once again would like to remind that There are
no alternatives without critique.