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/ / / / / /Feliz
Navidad
No more ‘scat’ after this (I promise, with the exception of Yung’s dream, of course!). In Barcelona, ‘el caganer’, (the Great Shitter) is an essential ornament to any crib. I’m sure Mikail Bakhtin would have approved; happy Christmas Love HauntedGeographies!
design | spirituality | bakhtin
/ / / / / /Bakhtin
AndHope
It was great to have the opportunity to go back to Goldsmiths and teach on the Design MA– revisiting Matt Ward’s old project, the ‘Carnivalisation of Space’– now filtered through Hakim Bey and TAZ! Last year, the brief was to engage with Bakhtin’s notion of carnival, essentially an invitation to wrestle with ‘open-endedness and becoming’– I spent weeks just re-writing the damn thing! It didn’t produce my best work but it certainly reconfigured my design sensibility, and maybe that was all it was ever meant to do. Self-carnivalise– screw with your head, and challenge the orthodoxy of the Cicada Mafia and ‘Helvetica alley’ (St John’s Street).
Bakhtin’s use of medieval carnival is complex, but he was essentially interested in the transgressive potential of certain folk rituals and practices. A set of ‘un-official’ procedures designed to question the attitudes and values of the then official culture, Church and State– ‘earthing’ oppressive regimes ‘via the evocation of utopian community’ (Michael Gardiner). Of course, it is no accident that he was also writing out of the authoritarian context of 1930’s Russia, and it is this insight that imbues his work with it’s classic ‘double voice’.
It is interesting that Bakhtin has never really been applied to design, although there has been plenty of pontificating over user-centric models and what exactly constitutes ‘critical design’. This explains why my key practical examples stretch the definition of design to its very limits– somewhere in the Papanek territory of goal-oriented patterning. The first is an event (production of space) that I stumbled across in 1998, the RTS appropriation of Brixton high street. Two mobile sound systems blocked the high street at either end and the party was set on its way. By the end of the day, kids were playing in sand pits where the 35-bus would normally run– it was a wonderfully heterotopic experience and it has always stuck in my mind. I set this action against the less (design) conscious events of 1992 and in particular Castlemorton Common, (wish more could be said here).
The second ‘production of space’ is the ‘Unspeakably Sick’ (Daily Mail), detournement of a TV channel, Chris Morris’s brilliant paedophilia special. A satire that proved so problematic, that it was put on hold for 3 months while lawyers wrangled over legal and ethical issues. This was even before it hit the ‘mock’ tabloid hysteria. The program was as much an assault on the cult of the child as an indictment of media hypocrisy.
These two examples both contest their particular milieu and draw on distinctly Bakhtinian procedures in order to open up debate– the ephemeral nature of their interrogation, again helps to ensure against dogmatic closure. RTS have essentially updated Carnival without stripping it of any of it’s political intent, for a few hours Brixton was a genuinely Temporary Autonomous Zone. Likewise Chris Morris, for 30 minutes, occupied a British terrestrial TV channel, probably one of the most ‘locked-down’ and un-democratic spaces in contemporary culture– you just can’t pitch up and use it.
Theoretically, I was concentrating on two inter-related aspects of Bakhtin’s thought. How his notions of dialogue and ‘critical utopia’ might relate to the practice of design. The ‘dialogical utterance’ is not just unique to Bakhtin’s interpretation of Carnival, it peppers all his work and probably could be regarded as his primary category. In ‘Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics’ there is this lovely quote: ‘I cannot manage without another, I cannot become myself without another’ (287). Very simply, ‘other’ is vital a component in the mechanism of constructing a ‘sense’ of self. I stress ‘sense’ here, as Bakhtin never conceived of the self as a monadic, ‘sovereign territory’. Subjectivity is constantly evolving in relation to other, people and things, there is this lovely notion of ‘assistance’. As in the way Marcus Doel’s uses Dr Seuss in ‘Un-Glunking Geography’:
‘Could she Un-thunk the Glunk alone?…
It’s very doubtful whether.
So I turned on MY Un-thinker.
We Un-thunk the Glunk together.’
Here, as in Carnival the action is collective, ‘AND’ rather than ‘IS’. The Cat in the Hat ‘AND’ his sister take-on the oppressive ‘IS’ of the Glunk. Or, the collective ‘ANDS’ of folk festival, via laughter and ‘symbolic degradation’ challenge the abstract phantoms of the ruling authority. Taking carnival as an example, the most productive areas are these ‘ANDS’, the gaps and intervals that exist within the crowd and the focus of critique. It is in these places that newness and becoming are created, in the ever-morphing negative spaces between entities– the ‘interstitial geography’ of debate.
Utopia is back on the radar, yet not in any of its old guises, hence the ‘critical’ prefix.
Zygmunt Bauman talks of utopia in terms of ‘exposing the field of the possible’, revealing all the made and un-made possibilities that occupy any given ‘event horizon’. Contemporary non-places are about ‘un-thunking’ the ‘glunks’, the politics of ‘and’ rather than ‘is’.
Bakhtin interests me for two reasons. Firstly, its really easy to see how his ideas around dialogue apply to design– dialogical design. Not only in terms of the designer-user relationship and more user-centric models but also with regards to ‘critical design’. As in some of the previous examples, where unique ‘productions of space’ are used to contest and interrogate monologic regimes. Quite simply, using design as a tool to open up dialogue where previously there had been none. This is the same Zombie logic as Derrida, except this time, instead of offering writing as ‘pharmakon’: blessing and curse, poison and cure, design itself becomes the ‘undecidable’. Noisy objects or processes that act like carnival, eschewing dogmatic closure and contesting space with their incessant chatter and infernal debate. As with the ‘Cat in the Hat’, they become small regions of ‘continuous variation in a wider chaosmos that we like to call a world’ (Doel).
Secondly, it doesn’t take a huge leap of imagination to link Carnival to Vaux. We were already beginning to read our work through Lewis Hyde’s The Gift and in particularly ideas of ‘dirt’ and ‘trickster’. Although the latter proves far too ‘heroic’ for my liking, especially when read through 20th Century archetypes of ‘The Artist’– essentially, a sermonising lone individual. However, it’s very frustrating to have discovered Bakhtin so late, as many of his ideas would have strengthened our practice– making it appear more rigorous and less reactionary!
We ticked all the boxes when it came to the tactical use of: ‘Billingsgate’ (profanity), grotesque images of the body and plain old laughter– particularly within the context of a church Mass (D1). Yet the really interesting aspects of Carnival are the twin notions of dialogue and critical utopia. Which I believe were present (in embryonic form) through out the life of Vaux– we were an antibody, a ‘dialogic community’ in the making.
space | bakhtin | design | utopia | dialogic
