of coping in the creative economy. For example, if our sense of time and space is co-constituted by the memory systems inherent in the creative economy of information technology and neoliberalism, how do we unpack and exceed that? In Technics and Time (1994) he argues that what is human and what is technical is co-original, that these two ontological domains (the human and the technical) co-constitute each other from the beginning and that without our technically inscribed memory systems we would not exist in time (Introna). Our externalized artifice as technology is what enables us to exist outside of a perpetual present. The character of this technicity, our “organized inorganic matter,” as Stiegler calls our thing-world (Stiegler, Technics 174), determines how we experience time and space. In Stiegler’s non-philosophical essays and lectures, a particular technicity belonging to the era of information technology and neoliberalism is constitutive of a contemporary creative economy model, where the designer or
‘creative’ is defined as an innovator and entrepreneur. Stiegler counters this perceived abyss with the idea of the creative amateur, an antidote to this particular technicity.
The vocation of Ars Industrialis, an association of which Stiegler was one of the
65. Richard Florida was (until 2019) Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute and (currently) Professor of Business and Creativity at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, home of the dramatically named Creative Destruction Lab: “Creative Destruction Lab’s exciting project promises to unleash a new wave of start-up innovation across Canada, creating thousands of middle-class jobs and further securing Canada's position as a world leader in the AI field.” – Navdeep Bains, Federal Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development, speaking at the lab in 2018. See: www.utoronto.ca/news/u-t-founded-creative-destruction-lab-receives-25-million-canadian-government.
founders, is to propose new territories of creativity and “hyper learning” guided by an “economy of contribution.” Instead of the creative economy they proposes a new context involving a renaissance of the symbolic and bidirectional social relations (or dialogue) towards which artists, cultural institutions, publics, social and economic actors need to work.66 Stiegler uses the image of Bartok’s admonition that one must only listen to music while following the score. This is an antidote to the “mechanical turn” in perception; that made it possible to consume music without knowing music. Glen Gould, he says, clarifies this by enabling the listener to control the parameters of the performance, thus to become a participant who is put into motion by the work.
The work is the potential of the movement it may trigger. This is how he describes the ‘amateur’
who should replace the ‘client’ or ‘consumer’ of the creative economy:
The figure of the amateur is the ideal type for the economy of contribution because the amateur is the one who builds him- or herself a sustainable libidinal economy and does not expect industrial society to put it in place. In this regard, the hacker is a subversive figure in his or her ability to appropriate the
technological and industrial situation without conforming to its requisite prescriptions, from marketing through to plans for industrial development.
Hackers are neither consumers nor clients or users: they are practitioners – that is to say, amateurs of the world in the age of its numerization. (Stiegler, “Amateur”)
This is the point where Stiegler sees the potential to regain savoir faire and savoir vivre because forms of knowledge as held by audiences and publics are being reconstituted. It is an opportunity for new avant-gardes to form, ones that constitute new publics. The definition of a (new) avant-garde (as opposed to a nostalgia for the historical art avant-garde or neo-avant-garde of mid-twentieth century) is that it can constitute such new publics in a contemporary context where “digital technologies result in a massive transfer of professional competences toward larger and larger segments of the public” (18). This is as easily a realm of a new dependence or
66. It is useful to compare this desire for a transformation of the everyday into an “economy of contribution” to architect Jean Nouvel’s idea of complicity, touched on above in discussing Vito Acconci’s de-design (Chapter 2): “You’ve said you prefer complicity to complexity …it reflects a real problem in architecture …only through this complicity do we achieve a certain degree of complexity, which isn’t an end in itself… complicity is the only guarantee that we’ll be able to push the boundaries. If this complicity is established, it means that something more than simple comprehension is going on between people, a shared meaning, mutual assistance… (Baudrillard and Nouvel 77).
addiction to fragmentation – Katherine Hayles’ hyper-attention – as it is the operating space of new forms of knowledge.67
Nevertheless, there is in Stiegler’s positioning vis-à-vis this aspect of the designed world a distinction of something that is blurred by terminology like ‘creative economy’ or ‘research-creation’ (the creative economy’s academic partner). The obvious opposite of the amateur might be the professional. ‘Professional’ implicates a level of skill and expertise it also signifies a gatekeeping of what can be named as valid (if we think back to de Duve’s Duchampian/Kantian nominalism in Chapter 2). Amateur connotes an expertise without that gatekeeping preoccupation (even the opposite preoccupation). I imagine that Stiegler is trying to un-blur that line (and focus the difference) by way of creating an actual shift in practices and ways of thinking (though he offers few real examples). The relation of ‘creative’ and ‘economy’ deserves to be pulled apart rather than amalgamated in a professionalization of all fields under the banner of the creative economy. Likewise, instead of professionalizing creation as an attribute of research, creation might be an amateur kind of ‘de-skilling,’ something that puts the knowledge-making format of research to the test.
My suggestion that the term ‘designed world’ could supplant or extend the critical question of public space (that Deutsche targets as the real space of critical practices of art and, in Rendell’s disciplinary reconfiguration, design) is intended to enlarge the scope of questioning that is possible in (or by) the unique nature of such practices, in their ‘doings and sayings,’ as Schatzki has named the radiating nature of material-human practice. This is to say that as we are doing (in the designed world) we are also coping (with the designed world). To ‘do’ is to make the expected moves in the flow and to ‘cope’ is to disturb that flow, even by standing still to think. Acconci’s ‘de-design’ and Rendell’s articulation of a ‘critical spatial practice’ in design and critical writing is one form of this coping, imagined as a non-conformist participation in public space. Margolin’s aside from within the flow of academic design studies is also such a pause, imagined more specifically in the professional field. Margolin asks how design itself copes with the designed world, in which design, as a field, is a principal and conscious factor.
67. In Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary (2008) Hayles defines hyper-attention as “a craving for continuously varying stimuli, a low threshold for boredom, the ability to process multiple information streams simultaneously, and a quick intuitive grasp of algorithmic procedures that underlie and generate surface complexity” as opposed to a more normalized ‘deep attention’ (Hayles 117).
How do designers de-design? More combatively, Stiegler’s amateur, updating and sharpening Flusser’s phenomenology of technical things, in the context of the creative economy, is an examination of the foundational DNA of our culture of innovation and a turning towards practices potentially labeled as art as an antidote to the designed world, a way to re-expand the horizon.
This is a provisional definition of an evolving kind of critical practice embedded in the designed world, one which risks its own standing as validated practice in order to stand (or sit, or lie, or flounder) across the flow. If the construction of knowledge in the university assumes that we are all involved in the same moving-forward, and all practices contribute to the same growing body of instrumental knowledge moving into the future, then what are practices that operate at a tangent to such an administrative sense of common project? We could call such a potentially fundamental engagements with imagination, art practice. This idea is informed by David Summer’s spatio-temporal inquiry into form/format and Schatzki’s clairvoyance regarding change, and informed also by a more practical evaluation of the evolution of the format of innovation in the creative economy (which seems to make critical theory into a component rather than a critique) through Stiegler and others. In terms of practices themselves, as generators of situations that might be described through these ideas, we have already encountered some artworks that, by their implication in a relationship between embodied practice and image technology, are enacting a performance of space and time. The following chapter looks at some examples of art as clairvoyant and spatial practices coping with the designed world from within, that is whose connection with an inquiry into the designed world is explicit and a matter of amateur complicity (following Acconci and Nouvel, see Chapter 2).
...we could talk in this case about “Design zum Tode,” or a type of design in which death is the all-encompassing horizon… what is the opposite design, a type of creation…
a process that doesn’t grow via destruction but very literally de-grows constructively…
Hito Steyerl, Duty Free Art (14)
Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, And human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect...
E. M. Forster, Howards End, 1910
In 1943, I found myself looking through a pile of 8×10 glossy photographs, air views of the centers of cities in the 150,000 to 250,000 range. I have forgotten why I was doing this.
George Nelson, The Human Element in Design (Harwood 97)