DESIGN IN POSTMODERNISM

The concept of design

Design is the artistic construction of the objective and non-objective world, taking into account: the optimal number of consumer features and manufacturing technology.

Design

A term denoting a new type of activity for the design of the subject world. Design appeared in the early 20th century. as a reaction to the spontaneous formation of visual and functional properties of the subject environment. Design develops samples of its rational construction corresponding to the complex functioning of modern society. Sometimes it is understood by Design only one of its areas — the design of aesthetic properties of industrial products. Design, however, solves broader socio-technical problems — the functioning of production, consumption, the existence of people in the subject environment. D. has a special attitude to all traditional types of design, resolving difficulties that are associated with the introduction of new subject organizations into the lives of specific people and society as a whole, creating an unbalanced situation in the subject world.

Postmodern design

The dual nature of design in postmodernity manifests itself quite unambiguously, as if in the literal sense of the word — design doubles, and its twin — a mirror image — begins to equip the world according to its own laws. Design in postmodernity acquires all the main features of the “written” phenomenon. The postmodern re-emphasis from Word to Letter — not the abstract games of “grammatology” — is a change of perspective that has radical cultural consequences. The design here is like litmus paper — this movement is most clearly visible on it: while remaining a border, it nevertheless radically changes due to an imperceptible and invisible, but real shift from the interior “edge” of the border to the exterior, turning from a border delineating, closing and creating a Place, into a dividing border facing outward erasing this Place for the sake of the external, for the sake of “essential emptiness”.

Design in Postmodern Discourse

The choice of methodology was determined by the complex nature of the object under study: the essence of design is not transcendent, but at the same time it is not alien to the transcendent due to its position “on the border” between the transcendent world and the real world. Design holds, plays, connects and separates these worlds without belonging to any of them. This boundary essence of design determines the very possibility of posing the problem of the ontology of design, despite the fact that it has all the features of an “ontic” phenomenon (i.e. related to the order of being).

The modern, obsessed with the idea of possession, usurped the right to a monologue in relations with a thing, cultivated unidirectional influence — possession entailed an “obligation” to improve, ennoble a thing, purify it from (nonessential), etc.

Should we be surprised at the constantly reproducible reduction of design to the skills of unnecessary adornment of goods to the principle of “demonstrative waste” or to total design? Moreover, it cannot be said that this is a passed stage, since modernism is not a historical “past”, and postmodernism is “present”. They are not so much temporal phenomena as specific ways of mentality, one of which may prevail at a certain moment, which does not exclude their coexistence. In this sense, the design can still remain unseen and unrecognized today.

Postmodernism is essentially the recognition by culture of the truth previously hidden from itself — the inevitable doubling of the object and the problem of representation arising on this basis. Such recognition entailed the need for a radical rethinking of the world.

The possession of a thing looks different now — now the right to its own existence is recognized for it. The thing is not fixed in the object, but lives the life of the text, therefore, the impact involves an exchange, entailing changes in things that cannot be judged unambiguously, which cannot be calculated — a dispute about superiority is irrelevant here. A person enters into a dialogue with a thing-text, but this is a dialogue of a special order — not I with Another, but I with the Text. The ability to engage in such a dialogue is a kind of evidence of a person’s reconciliation with the pluralistic, ambiguous, accident-prone nature of the world, of which postmodern discourse is actually a representation.

In the dialogue between the Self and the Text, mutual nothingness does not occur, which is inevitable in the case of a dialogue between the Self and Another, on the contrary, the Self regenerates the thing, expands it, increases it. The result of such a dialogue will not be mutual changes in the boundaries of one’s own identity, but endless mutations of the thing — the text.

Design as a border ceases to exist in two cases: either devoting itself to one of the border worlds (whether it is “high” art or everyday environment), that is, when it begins to claim its own content; or devoting itself to the game, when the same thing turns out to be on both sides of the border, and it has nothing in fact delineate — which means turning it into a contour.

The analysis of the rhetorical nature of design led to the question of the resolving abilities of postmodern discourse. In the modernist paradigm, design remains unrecognized due to the cult of the “inviolability” of the border as a guarantor of the unity and solidity of the established structure of the all-encompassing Order. Since the modernist ideology demanded full control over this construction and could not allow any deviations or autonomy of anything, the most important task was to ensure the security of borders by clearly marking them, which meant:

the “exclusion of the average”, the suppression or destruction of everything ambiguous, everything that sits straddling the fence, and thereby compromises the vital distinction between “internal” and “external”. Building and maintaining order means forming a circle of friends and fighting enemies. But above all, it means the abolition of ambivalence."

At the same time, design certainly fits into the postmodernist discourse, because the boundary of design allows it to be classified as marginal, while postmodernism itself arose from the theoretical justification of the right of marginal cultural phenomena (that is, those that for one reason or another were outside the modernist norm) to rehabilitation. The deviation was recognized as that which was not correlated with the ideal of a free, critically thinking subject and in its practical unfolding was alien to transcendence, but, on the contrary, was turned to everyday, object-visual, directly experienced existence. Design is marginalized in the most diverse senses of the word: in the direct sense — as a boundary substance, in the socio-cultural sense — as the practice of profaning “high standards”, and finally, in the pseudo-psychoanalytic sense — as a phenomenon “displaced” (to a large extent)

from the field of theoretical consciousness.

Marginal literally means “to be written in the margins of a book, to be on the edge,” which provides a fairly wide range for interpretation. The marginal, since it is “on the sidelines”, is often equated with the insignificant, secondary, as, for example, Zh. Baudrillard in the “System of Things”. Of course, this is a game, because the pathos of postmodern discourse (in which Zh. Baudrillard), consists in raising the “insignificant” marginal to the rank of “significance”, which in a certain way changes the balance of power in modern culture.

Design desacralizes, or marginalizes, a thing — translates it into a state that can be evaluated at least in two ways: as intermediate, that is, as no, and as median — the most stable, the most optimal. Indeed, a marginal position can be more than reliable, because borderline, or rather borderline, means non-belonging: to be on the border means to be nothing. But if you are nothing, you are everything, anything, but it also means that you can do anything with you. Design, outlining the space and labeling it with things, placing things in it, making them appropriate, deprives them at the same time of the only and unique place from which things proclaim themselves. This is where the transformation of the border into a contour takes place.

Conclusion

Patient’s anamnesis — Postmodernism

The point, of course, is not the evil intent of the postmodern paradigm, which presents innocent things in a distorted light. Postmodernism arises as a reflection on the actual changes taking place in reality as the civilizational form of the social organism develops, despite the fact that these seemingly radical changes are often based on the experience of the past, and postmodernism itself is essentially not new, but technologically camouflaged known and experienced. It is no coincidence that J.-F. Lyotard calls postmodern the process of “working out” its own meaning by modernity and believes that

“it is possible to understand the work of contemporary artists — from Monet to Duchamp and Barnett Newman — only by comparing their work with anamnesis in psychoanalytic therapy. The patient is trying to work out his current illness with the help of free associations, linking clearly disparate mental elements with past situations — which, in fact, allows him to discover the hidden meanings of his life and behavior.”

Immersion in analysis, anamnesis that allows you to work through the “initially forgotten”, is fraught with uncontrolled multiplication of identity — the appearance of simulacra.

Simulacrum (from Latin simulo, “pretend, pretend”) is a “copy” that does not have the original.In the modern sense, the word simulacrum was coined by Jean Baudriard. Earlier (starting with Plato’s Latin translations) it meant simply an image, a picture, a representation. For example, a photograph is a simulacrum of the reality that is displayed on it. Not necessarily the exact image as in the photo: paintings, drawings in the sand, retelling a real story in your own words — all these are simulacra.