The Symbol °1
Image: Michael and HushiIn New York City September 2001, I bought an Iranian graffiti hoodie from Michael and Hushi. Emblazoned across the fabric were spray tags spurting positive messages in Persian about Iranian women. One day after I flew out of New York, the WTC came tumbling down. A month later, in a coffee shop, while donning the hoodie, I was berated by the barista. He asked what was it that it said. I said I did know exactly, but was told that they were traditional and positive Persian texts about women. He doubted whether there was something positive to be said. He then told me he was Jewish. I got my coffee and left, but perhaps I should have spent the time to explain to him that Persian does not equal Arabian, and Arab does not equal heathen. A month later, I was in New York again, wearing the hoodie and a women stopped me in the East Village on 8th. She asked whether I was the designer. I said, no, but they have a shop nearby. Oh no, she said, it closed down straight after September 11. "They were having too much trouble."
Image: Michael and Hushi
Symbols are important although it is not the content that is most significant today. People rally around symbols, connected by their worries and concerns even if their dreams are different. These anxieties are easier to voice than one’s hopes because positive thoughts require an unfathomed leap into the unknown. Also, the burden of proof for the negation is easier to fulfill. For example, it’s less committal to prove what we don’t stand for or don’t want.
At the same time, Chantal Mouffe warns of an ambivalent, post-political vision which fails to acknowledge the antagonistic dimension of the political. Mouffe observes that the idea of universal rights, consensus and ‘doing good’ breaks down the notion of left/right. Consequently, the disaffection with the blurred border of centre, left and right parties has witnessed growths of other types of collective identities, entrenched in lifestyle and moral choices. And here is where the danger lies. Populists use this strategy of simplification to play on the climate of ambiguity. It provides simple answers to complex questions and often shut out dissent through pragmatic, no nonsense messages: it’s either yes or no. And they use symbols for this: a burqa, perhaps. Thus, populists create an object-orientated democracy where vast systems of things are objectified and lose their relation to other things. Thus, the rules, decisions and experiences we have developed over time lose their content and all that remains is form – the carrier of meaning.
cover image: SKOR's OPEN 20
Ernst Laclau calls this the empty signifier, where differential elements are bound at a nodal point. It is the ultimate totalisation - through signification. Here, the mode of articulation is more important than the content because the symbol has been stripped of all it relations. Thus, the strategy to confront populism is via disrupting objects (symbols) that comprise form, or in the words of Laclau, to weaken the signs through embedding particularities. The signs keep their radicalism but inscribe a different ‘chain of equivalence’.
Henceforth, we must design for meanings to take shape in relation to many things and create a conflict of representation. We have to make sure things do not appear timeless, fixed and immutable, which is unlike the populist approach. The design for organisations must acknowledge everything is situated in a process over time and thus form changes in negotiation with its surrounding. This can be done by building up a sequence. Building a sequence allows for temporality within communication and thus an engagement with the organisation over time; viewers can then begin producing communication like communication produces us.
The sequence must not be bounded by norms but instead generated from within. The sequence is algorithmic: a set of instructions that generate different outcomes under different conditions. They begin from defining the basic element (individual component) but this is not as important as its interaction and understanding it in an assemblage of multiple actions. We can use these rules generatively. This renders a striking auto-poeticism where decisions are also lost under a barrage of images without a totalising aesthetic. This is where the design negation comes in to effect, by engaging the viewer to select one antagonism over another.
