Introduction: the metaphysical horizon
of sustainability
Sustain: from O.F. s(o)us
tenir; L. Sub + tenere: to hold from below; to support (as
with sub-stance and sub-ject).
Can we speak of the discipline of design, and the discipline of design history that would archive its practices, consolidate its origins, regulate its discourses and define its borders? In one respect we can and we do continually activate such a disciplinary field and its historical dimensions, though perhaps as nominalists, as those who recognise that ‘design’ is the name given to a complex of practices that cannot be grounded in a unified structure or meta-theory, that it constitutes a series of more-or-less complementary discourses, at times contradictory, whose practices are heterogeneous to the supposed ideal unity of the defined objects of its discourses. Design histories would perhaps activate the three modes suggested by Nietzsche in his Uses and Abuses of History: those of the monumental, the antiquarian and the critical. With the first we have a history for those aspiring to greatness, for those who will read in what has happened, the monuments, the greatness of what will be. The second is reserved for those who revere the past, absorbed in the correctness of what has happened in and for itself. As with the first, the past is inflated and the new, what is to come, is despised. Whereas critical history is a creative destruction, a shattering of monuments and antiquities. It activates a past in the present that opens the possibility of a future. It is Nietzsche’s history of the present that Martin Heidegger addresses directly in Being and Time, when discussing the ontology of history as a history of the present.[1] It is also that which Michel Foucault references in his “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” in terms of his own understanding of a history of the present.[2] This paper aims to engage a particular nexus of relations between Heidegger and Foucault to approach the question of an ontology of design history. The engagement will be based upon an understanding of historicity as ontological history and historical ontology as the destining of being. This discussion happens in the context of questioning an understanding of sustainability from the vantage point of historical ontology, such that a critical history may enable us to think it otherwise.
We are asked to consider the urgent need to address sustainability in the critical sense of the crises, complex and manifold, of global planning and production. The discourses, histories and theories of design, though increasingly tagging their formations with ‘sustainability’ may require something more than just a turn or fold of these discourses, encountered as the vitality of a timely address. The proposition is that we may need to look to new paradigms for thinking design history in order to arrive at our present differently such that a future yet to be thought emerges, that future not so much tagged or labelled ‘sustainability’ but rather something as yet not thinkable, that may indeed not even be recognisable as what we currently conceive as futural. Sustainability is not the name for solutions but the naming of a crisis. The crisis is and has been sustainability, at least as it has emerged in a modernity whose ground or sub-stance has been the human sub-ject. As will be further discussed, from the perspective of a history of being, modernity unfolds with the cogito becoming subjective substance, or ground for the disclosure of beings that are. The subsequent naming of being in modernity (Kantian ‘nature’, Hegelian ‘spirit’, Nietzschean ‘will-to-power’, Heideggerian ‘Enframing’ or ‘orderability’, thence ‘replaceability’ as the already disposable) opens sustainability-design, within this metaphysical history of being, as its most immediate naming. As this paper will come to argue, the ground of sustainability is coincident with that of the subject as substantial disclosure of being, Enframing as the greatest danger and Enowning as the pre-apprehension of its decisive break. Sustainability-design is the crisis of disposed humanity as the already-consumed.
There is a now significant body of critical writing on the discipline of design and design history that questions its orthodox foundations, its positivist instrumentalism, the assumed humanist agencies of its practices, the unquestioned progressivist or teleological functioning of its programmes and projects. In one sense this paper aligns with a larger body of work that has itself activated coincident critical and philosophical ground. This is particularly the case in questioning something fundamental to how the historical is thought in design, as if what we understand as “the designed” can be segmented or differentiated into its own history. But clearly we here have the inextricable doubling of two critical issues, that of an understanding of design bounded by the most orthodox of historical frameworks, and that of the notion of history whose own activations need to be understood in a radical sense of design. Equally, current discourses of sustainability, though heterogeneous, are predominantly humanist and neo-liberal, and in one form or another positivist and totalising. Though there is an important body of critical writing on sustainability that aligns well with this paper, I want to argue for the urgency in recognising the extent to which sustainability now names design as planetary project and in this sense constitutes the crisis of design itself. In the context of Martin Heidegger’s seminal essay on technology, sustainability is the most recent name for the greatest danger.[3] It is the most recent name for design as such, and I would suggest that we may recognise sustainability-design as the opening horizon of the historicity of the historiographical, of that which decisively opens history.
In
the conclusion to his book on Heidegger, Foucault and spatial history, Stuart
Elden references a comment made by the postmodern geographer, Edward Soja who
was discussing the need for a study on the role of space in key Western
thinkers. Soja suggests that such a book would be hindered by “the almost
complete absence of a secondary literature that explicitly and perceptively
addresses the problematic relation between historicality and spatiality.”[4] While we
may debate the merits of such a project, I want to emphasise what Soja refers
to as the problematic relation between historicality, or historicity as an
ontological approach to history, and spatiality, understood as an ontological
approach to space and place. In one sense this paper wants to address the
complexity of relations between historiography and design understood
ontologically.[5]
I want to start by discussing some aspects of Foucault’s own historical or
genealogical research.
It was a matter of analyzing, not behaviours or ideas, nor societies and their “ideologies,” but the problematizations through which being offers itself to be, necessarily, thought—and the practices on the basis of which these problematizations are formed. The archaeological dimension of the analysis made it possible to examine the forms themselves; its genealogical dimension enabled me to analyze their formation out of the practices and the modifications undergone by the latter.[6]
Problematisations
and practices, enunciative modalities and practices of subjectification,
certainly by the late 1970s constituted for Michel Foucault the ontological
dimension to his histories of social and medical practices, techniques of
normalisation, disciplinary models, and aesthetics of existence. The
“Introduction” to The Uses of Pleasure,
constituting as well an introduction to The
Care of the Self, enabled Foucault
to establish, perhaps retroactively, the kernel of his practices, what he
termed “games of truth,” in order to write a history of truth: “Not a history
that would be concerned with what might be true in the fields of learning, but
an analysis of the ‘games of truth’, the games of truth and error through which
being is historically constituted as experience; that is, as something that can
and must be thought.”[7] Foucault
goes on to say something curious and, in a sense, immediately turns around what
we might have thought to be the specific objects of his enquiry. He suggests
that the studies he is currently undertaking, those of Classical Greek and
Roman texts on “an art of existence,” like those studies he has previously
undertaken, are studies of “history” but not the work of an “historian”: “The
object was to learn to what extent the effort to think one’s own history can
free thought from what it silently thinks, and so enable it to think
differently.”[8]
Hubert Dreyfus famously reminded us, in a presentation
on being and power, that Foucault in his last interview spoke to what I think
may be evident in the brief quotes I have already provided from some of his
last writings. Foucault suggests: “For me Heidegger has always been the
essential philosopher …. My entire philosophical development was determined by
my reading of Heidegger.”[9] Dreyfus goes on to quote Foucault a little
more from his last interview. Foucault says: “I am simply Nietzschean …”
Dreyfus emphasises that Foucault came to Nietzsche via Heidegger. “Games of
truth and error” we read as particularly Nietzschean, and we recognise in
Foucault’s “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” the fold or shift from archaeology
to genealogy, from the problematisations of the sayable and seeable, the
discursive and non-discursive, to a micro-politics of power as productive of
knowing selves, to practices of subjectivation.[10] And it
is not for nothing that after his encounter with Nietzschean genealogy,
Foucault works through a radical disclosure with respect to the emergence of
modernity, precisely in what he terms the bio-political. Bios here, as Heidegger will emphatically stress, is not in
Nietzsche’s thought a biologism as, for example, with a theory of race. The
most damaging encounters with Nietzsche in fact took this track. Rather, we
could perhaps now most fully understand the articulation of bios, life, in this context, with
respect to Heidegger, Foucault and Nietzsche, through Giorgio Agamben’s
understanding of ‘bare life’, as an ontological disclosure of the primordial
existence of the existent, of the being of human beings in the epoch of
orderability or Enframing.[11]
Foucault’s engagement with the bio-political as that
disclosive horizon for modernity is decisive for our understanding of the
emergence of the problematisations and practices that have constituted the
complicated and competing fields of sustainability-design. We will be
particularly focusing on this aspect of Foucault’s work in part III of this
paper. For the moment, I want to draw out something about Foucault’s
understanding of “one’s own history,” and then go on to say something more
about Heidegger in part II of the paper.
When
Foucault suggested that his studies are “studies of ‘history’,” I would want to
read this genitive in the sense that in whatever domain Foucault is working,
the fundamental problematisation is history
as such, its very possibility or horizon from which historicity essentially
unfolds, the historicity of the historiographical. One’s own self is not for
Foucault the humanist subject of knowledge, the ego-self of a Cartesian cogito. This humanist self as
substantial ground for knowing is precisely what Foucault most problematises in
his notion of an historical a priori
as radically exterior to subjectivity and that which constitutes the
subjections of knowing selves. It is for this reason that we would want to read
Foucault’s “care of the self” with Heidegger’s engagement in Being and Time with temporality and
historicity. As Heidegger notes: “We defined
the being of Da-sein as care. Its ontological meaning is temporality.”[12]
For Heidegger, temporality is understood as the
primordial condition of the possibility of care
and in relation to history: “The analysis of the historicity of Da-sein
attempted to show that this being is not ‘temporal’, because it ‘is in history’,
but because, on the contrary, it exists and can exist historically only because
it is temporal in the ground of its being. “[13] As
Da-sein is essentially being-in-the-world, the historicity of Da-sein is
essentially world historical: “With the existence of historical
being-in-the-world, things at hand and objectively present have always already
been included in the history of the world.”[14] Without wanting to make a simple word-play on
Da-sein and design, in as much as Heidegger suggests in Being and Time that history opens in the historicity of Da-sein, in
that Da-sein is ontologically temporal, a history of things at hand, as a
design-history, is opened ontologically by Da-sein’s being there. Heidegger will reference Nietzsche’s three
historical modes as the three ec-stases of temporality in futurity, pastness
and the moment of authentic resoluteness:
Da-sein temporalises itself in the way the future and having been are united in the present … As authentic, the historiography which is both monumental and antiquarian is necessarily a critique of the ‘present’. Authentic historicality is the foundation for the possibility of uniting these three ways of historiography.[15]
It
is this fundamental relation of self to history that palpably constitutes a
shift evident in The Uses of Pleasure
and The Care of the Self that demands
an opening to a question of self previously unchartered in Foucault’s work.
Under various headings, “the art of existence,” where “art” translates the
Latin “ars” itself translating (or
mistranslating) the Greek “techne,”
or “techniques of the self,” later articulated by Foucault as “technologies of
the self,” on the one hand constitutes what Gilles Deleuze emphasised as the
third essential ontology for Foucault,[16] and, on
the other hand, marks the imperative of a detour for Foucault beyond the
threshold to modernity, as an essential terrain by which to pose a question
concerning the desiring self that seems impossible to pose precisely because of
the closed horizons of modernity’s subjectifications:
It seemed to me, therefore, that the question that ought to guide my inquiry was the following: how, why, and in what form was sexuality constituted as a moral domain? … But in raising this very general question, and directing it to Greek and Greco-Roman culture, it occurred to me that the problematisation was linked to a group of practices that have been of unquestionable importance in our societies; I am referring to what might be called the “arts of existence.” What I mean by this phrase are those intentional and voluntary actions by which men not only set themselves rules of conduct, but also seek to transform themselves, to change themselves in their singular being, and to make their life into an oeuvre that carries certain aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria.[17]
Let’s
return to the question of “one’s own history” and the effort to think it. Why
would there be such an effort, given that it is what should be most proximate
to us, most available for thinking? Foucault, in fact, seems to be suggesting
the opposite, perhaps not quite the opposite but certainly some kind of
impasse. If one does not make an effort to think one’s own history, then
thought in a real sense is un-free, caught presumably in what it is unaware of
as its binding, and in this boundedness, thought returns to the same. Thinking
one’s own history, perhaps ironically at first glance, seems to be that
thinking that opens an horizon of potentiality for difference, for thinking
what is unthought.[18] Foucault expresses it like this: “After all,
what would be the value of the passion for knowledge if it resulted only in a
certain amount of knowledgeableness and not, in one way or another and to the
extent possible, in the knower’s straying afield of himself?”[19] We need to say something more here. When
Foucault was developing his earlier phase of “archaeology,” he emphasised the
difference between two understandings of knowing, which in French are expressed
in two different terms, connaissance
and savoir, though translated into
English by the single term. Recognising
Foucault’s debt to Heidegger opens a precise understanding of this difference
he is making, and the notion of history he is working with.
Connaissance generally refers to knowing in the sense of that
which corresponds between subjects and objects, or, more generally, knowledge
as epistemology, particularly that grounded in science. By savoir he means something quite different: the conditions of
possibility for the types of objects to be given to connaissance in the first place. That is, how is it that certain
things and not others became the objects of truth. By “conditions of
possibility,” he employed the term we understand, particularly from Kant as a priori. However, he expresses the
concerns of archaeology as those of locating historical a priori, or what constitutes a primordial order such that
particular objects become caught in the games of truth. This distinction
between epistemology and historical a
prioris may be correlated to Heidegger’s understanding of ontological
difference, the difference between beings that are in the world and the being
of those beings. We have noted the difference Heidegger draws between history,
in its average everydayness, as a history of that which is present-at-hand,
things in the world and the primordial disclosure or possibility for that
history in the historicity of Da-sein. The ontological disclosure of the connaissance of history is a savoir understood as the ec-static
temporality of human being, itself engaged by both Heidegger and Foucault via
Nietzsche. It was in his inaugural
lecture as Chair of the Collège de France,
‘The Order of Discourse’ that Foucault made explicit the relation between
savoir, or ontological disclosure and pouvoir,
or power understood in a Nietzschean way as will-to-power or will-to-knowledge.[20] Though
Foucault does not discuss ontological difference, it becomes embedded in his
understanding of what he terms the power-knowledge dispositif, where dispositif
may be translated as complex, grid, system, and correlates somewhat with a term
developed by Heidegger in “The Question Concerning Technology” to disclose the
essence of technology as Ge-stell, often
translated as “Enframing.” [21]
We turn to Heidegger to discuss further an
understanding of an ontological disclosure of design and history. We should be
aware though that after Being and Time,
and in Heidegger’s turn to a primordial concern with the disclosure of the
meaning of being, rather than the disclosure of Da-sein as openness-to-being,
Heidegger’s concern with history and historicity becomes a concern with the
history of being, with the essential disclosure of the ways in which being has
been named, and in the de-structuring of this history in order to retrieve the
primordial disclosure of being. That is to say, Heidegger’s project of ontology
is essentially and inescapably finite and historical, understood as the
disclosure of the “sendings” of being and the primordial giving of these
sendings.
Heidegger’s
life-long concern was with the question of being which he saw by the end of the
1960s as articulated in three phases: initially, and particularly with Being and Time, was a concern with the
meaning of being disclosive of the essence of Da-sein as openness to being.[22]
Heidegger had a “precise signification” for ‘meaning’ in the expression
‘meaning of being.’ Meaning is understood from the ‘project region’ unfolded by
the understanding of being, where again ‘understanding’ has a precise
signification as a “standing before: residing before, holding oneself at an
equal height (theoria) with what one
finds before oneself.”[23] This formulation was open to considerable
misinterpretation, as ‘project’ was too easily understood as “a human
performance,” reverting the question of meaning to that of subjectivity. This
in fact was Heidegger’s criticism of Sartre’s reading of Being and Time. A second and extended phase substitutes “truth” for
meaning, asking the truth of being: “In order to counter this mistaken
conception and retain the meaning of “project” as it is to be taken (that of
the opening disclosure), the thinking after Being
and Time replaced the expression “meaning of being” with “truth of being.”[24] This
opens Heidegger’s extensive elaborations on aletheia,
truth as unconcealedness which is opposed to truth as correctness, an
understanding of truth that opened with Platonism and culminated in the
Cartesian cogito me cogitare,
expressed for Kant in terms of an I think
that accompanies all of my representations, hence a subject constituted as
ground for truth of an object. This finite subject-ground becomes absolute with
Hegel. Aletheia, as primordial unconcealedness of the being of beings
itself becomes concealed. Heidegger suggests: “ek-stasis is nothing other than
the relation of Da-sein for αληθεια, in which all temporality arises.”[25]
We have already suggested that Foucault responds
initially to this difference in how he uses the terms connaissance and savoir
with respect to archaeology and how he recognises the proximity of savoir and pouvoir, power, in his genealogical projects that respond more
palpably to Nietzsche. The difference is understood in Heidegger’s seminal
“Question Concerning Technology” as, on the one hand, aletheia’s disclosure of Da-sein’s essential belonging to being as
bringing-forth, expressed by Heidegger as poeisis
in its relation to techne. On the
other hand, human being as ground, as subject,
and truth as correctness, discloses the essence, the being of technology as Ge-stell Enframing, or ordering and Da-sein’s
essential relation to being as challenging-forth, constituting
beings-as-a-whole as ordered resource. Again, we have already noted that the
notion of dispositif used by Foucault
to engage the complex Enframing of power-knowledge relations may be thought in
proximity to Ge-stell. In the Le
Thor seminars of the late 1960s Heidegger thinks Enframing and Enowning
together in a co-belonging. Technological Enframing is the advent of Enowning:
“It means that thinking begins anew, so that in the essence of technology it catches
sight of the heralding portent, the covering pre-appearance, the concealing
pre-appearing of Enowning itself.”[26]
There is a third
phase for Heidegger in pursuing the question of being, no longer as the truth
of being (aletheia) but as the topos of being, where topos, location, place is understood
radically, exceeding the ontological horizon: “And in order to avoid any
falsification of the sense of truth, in order to exclude its being understood
as correctness, “truth of being” was explained by “location of being” [Ortschaft]—truth as locality [Ortlichkeit] of being. This already
presupposes, however, an understanding of the place-being of place. Hence the
expression topology of be-ing
[Topologie des Seyns] …”[27] Something needs to be said concerning the
notion “Enowning,” which translates the Heideggerian term “Ereignis.” This translation is not without controversy as Ereignis has been translated at times as
“event,” “appropriation,” or “event of appropriation.” The term predominates in
some of the essays in the collection The
Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays and is crucial in “The
Principle of Identity” and the late Heidegger essay Time and Being.[28]
However, with the more recent publication in English of Heidegger’s late 1930s Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning),
the translators broke with the lexical connectivity of German and English in Ereignis as “event of appropriation,”
and opted for a radical translation as “Enowning.”[29] Ereignis at the best of times was
difficult to pin down. Heidegger did not want it translated at all: “as little
translatable as the guiding-Greek word λογος and the Chinese
Tao … and is … a singulare tantum.”[30] The
book Contributions to Philosophy is
difficult, but germane to our discussion on history, as its rather strange
structure, which appears very much like an extensive series of notes by
Heidegger to himself, is Heidegger showing the active character of
“being-historical thinking.”
The translators of the Le Thor seminars maintained the term
“Enowning,” which the seminars elaborate on with respect precisely to
being-historical. Enowning has an extraordinary relation to being, and to the
sendings of the destinal epochs of being: “There is no destinal epoch of
Enowning. Sending is from Enowning.”[31]
Enowning in this sense exceeds the ontological horizon. Heidegger suggests, in
the discussion on this exceeding, that his thinking of the ontological
difference was an impasse. It is not that Enowning appears at the end of the
history of being, as something beyond it but rather it is only from Enowning
that the history of being is able to appear as
history of being.[32]
Heidegger proceeds in the 1969 Le Thor seminar to engage in the co-belonging of
Enframing and Enowning: “We will now attempt to bring into the open this
pre-appearing of Enowning under the veil of Enframing.”[33]
Heidegger discusses one of the sendings of being, destined to “man in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries.”[34]
With the further
unfolding of modern technology, objectivity transforms into standing
reservedness: “Already today [1969] there are no longer objects (no beings,
insofar as these would stand against a subject taking them into view)—there are
now standing reserves (beings that are held in readiness for being consumed).”[35] The
essence as ontological determination of standing reserve is orderability,
rather than persistence or permanence, orderability that posits being as
disposable in plan-driven consumption. The essential character of being is
replaceability: “The industry of “consumer” products and the predominance of
the replacement make this empirically obvious. Today being is
being-replaceable.”[36] Beings
as a whole in their being-replaceable are essentially already-consumed thus
calling for their replacement. Heidegger gives emphasis to the following: “It
is not sufficient, however, to determine these realities ontically. What stands
in question is that modern man finds
himself henceforth in a fundamentally new relation to being—AND THAT HE
KNOWS NOTHING OF IT. … The human is the placeholder of the nothing.”[37] The
human is “used” by being. However, “being needs man as the there of its
manifestation.”[38]
Ereignis, Enowning is the opening there of the manifestation of the
sendings of being, of historical-being, topology of be-ing.
There is one more
thing to discuss with Heidegger before returning to a second engagement with
Foucault. In his Parmenides lectures
and again in Contributions to Philosophy,
Heidegger makes a further essential point with respect to historical being, or
being-historically. Genuine thinking requires a “leap” to the groundless that
is the leap into being. The open as the freeing of every being in its being is
a securing in the open of being, the groundless.[39] This
securing is not a refuge for Da-sein precisely in the sense that the open,
groundless, as the essential abode of ‘man’ conceals the primordial decision by
which being bestows on man
unconcealedness, aletheia: “The
character of this bestowal hides and secures the way historical man belongs
with the bestowal of being … A decision on this entitlement is rarely made.”[40] History
happens, the beginning of history happens in Da-sein’s decisive belonging to aletheia: “It is made every time the
essence of truth, the openness of the open, is determined primordially. And
that is the beginning of history.”[41] Precisely because ‘man’ belongs to the
bestowal of being he sees into the open. But equally he can forget being in
adhering to the unconcealed. In Contributions
to Philosophy, under a heading “Why Must Decisions Be Made?” Heidegger
clarifies further what he understands by decision:
The
time-space character of decision [is] to be grasped being-historically and not
morally-anthropologically, i.e., as the bursting cleavage of be-ing itself.
Making room in preparation is, then, indeed not a supplementary reflection but
the other way round.
Overall
[it is a question of] rethinking being-historically (but not “ontologically”)
the whole of human being as soon as it is grounded in Da-sein.[42]
Let us return to what I had
earlier identified as something essential to Foucauldian research: “The object
was to learn to what extent the effort to think one’s own history can free
thought from what it silently thinks, and so enables it to think differently.”[43] I would
now particularly read Foucault’s research, delivered at the Collège de France in the late 1970s, as
genealogical engagements with historical-being or being-historically that
reveals beings-as-a-whole as standing reserve, orderability, already-consumed
and disposed. His genealogy, as a history of the rationality of practices,
constitutes in its micropolitics of the exercise of power, the opening to a
governmentality of design as that which would give a name to modernity’s epoch
of technicity, or the concealing of aletheia
in the dominion of the calculable. I suggest we might look to particular
Foucault texts for the emergence of a series of problematisations and practices
at the end of the eighteenth century that constitute a savoir as the conditions of possibility or historical a priori for the specific objects of
design discourses and practices. In his attunement to historical-being,
Foucault, even in the wealth of details of practices, does not close off his
thinking to the unconcealing of the being of those beings, rather than merely
having concern with the unconcealed as such. Design histories, proximally and
for the most part, have concerned themselves with the mere unconcealedness of
beings in their historiographical ontic encounter, whether those histories are
dominated by positivist paradigms of design-science and history as fact, or
dominated by interpretative and hermeneutical concerns with the meanings of an
artefact world, its ethos and agency, or defined by formalist and aesthetic
concerns with categories of design, author-creator agents and the
connoisseurship of expert-critics.
But what is the cleave
in be-ing that decisively opens history for Foucault, or in what way, for
Foucault, does Enowning enown being? How is the ‘biopolitical’ an opening of
history? Foucault’s 1978 lecture series, Security,
Territory, Population, references biopolitics as the overarching concern of
the lecture course:
This year
I would like to begin studying something that I have called, somewhat vaguely,
bio-power. By this I mean a number of phenomena that seem to me to be quite
significant, namely, the set of mechanisms through which the basic biological
features of the human species became an object of a political strategy, of a
general strategy of power, or, in other words, how, starting from the
eighteenth century, modern Western societies took on board the fundamental
biological fact that human beings are a species.[44]
We recognise that Foucault’s
project, the language he uses and fundamental concerns seem to bear no relation
at all to Heidegger’s, that he is concerned with concrete practices understood
as instances of more fundamental structures or mechanisms where Heidegger’s exclusive
concern is with the primordial structure of the history of being, that seems to
‘sacrifice ontic engagements in the maintenance of unconcealing the question of
being.[45] Yet, I
would suggest that Foucault, in his detailed analyses of the emergence of what
he terms “apparatuses of security” from the eighteenth century, is engaging
with the essential or primordial structures that reveal how the beings that are
can be experienced and understood. In brief, Foucault outlines three mechanisms
or procedures, particularly from the sixteenth century, that may be said to be
coincident, though from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, will emerge
and recede. These are legal or juridical procedures, disciplinary mechanisms
and apparatuses of security.
For Foucault, power is
constitutive of relations of force and disclosive
of forms of knowing. In terms of Dreyfus’s engagement with Foucault and
Heidegger on power and being, we may begin to understand Foucault’s power-knowledge
dispositif in terms of Heidegger’s
ontological difference. Power is not a substance and hence is not something
possessed or held by a subject. Rather, power is a relation understood (savoir) ontologically, diffuse and
productive of ontical subjects who themselves, and from the point-of-view of
the ontical, seem to have or not have power in the sense of being those beings
whose truth (connaissance)
corresponds correctly or incorrectly with things. The epochal shifts in the
‘sendings’ of being are understood in Foucault’s terms as transformations in
relations of force or the constituents of will-to-power as will-to-truth. The
shifts from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries may be understood as epochal
shifts in being, in how on such and such an horizon, at this time or that, the
order of things is fundamentally disclosed. Thus with the first, juridical and
legal mechanisms or procedures, there is a relation of (sovereign) power to a territory,
to what is governed or to be governed: “a coupling, comprising the code,
between, for example, a type of prohibited action and a type of punishment.”[46]
We might also
consider this relation as one between the individuated being of power and the
things or individuals subjected to power within the defined territory to be
governed, that is to say, primordially grounded in a subject/object relation
that we hardly question. We note, however, the significance Heidegger gives to
Descartes and Foucault to Galileo in the fundamental epistemic upheaval that
inaugurates the modern subject as substantial ground of certainty. We also note
the degree to which Foucault spatialises being historically in an ontological
disclosure of beings. With disciplinary mechanisms that particularly emerged in
the seventeenth century, it is not as if sovereign power disappeared, but
rather a “third personage” became involved in the compact between sovereign and
individual: “a series of adjacent, detective, medical, and psychological
techniques appear which fall within the domain of surveillance, diagnosis, and
the possible transformation of individuals.”[47] This
auxiliary series becomes the predominant technique for maintaining or
controlling the flows and movements that complicate a simpler understanding of
‘territory’. Foucault’s example here is often the systematic processes of
segmentation and confinement with epidemics, or the maintenance and ordering of
a dangerous mass of the unemployed or vagabond classes.
The third of these,
apparatuses of security, do not displace juridical procedures, nor disciplinary
mechanisms, but engage precisely where these two encounter their limits. Thus, for example, with the question of
criminality, what is the probability of re-offending; what is the cost of
punishment in relation to the cost of criminal activity; what kinds of people
commit this crime and can they be prevented before the crime happens and so on?
Security emerges as a technique in the eighteenth century with the development
of the science of statistics, as a measure and inventory of the state. The
state is no longer territory, but rather that which statistical relations can
discern. With statistics, a new entity appears on the horizon of the governance
of the state, that of population. It was recognised that at the level of
population a state can be planned in ways fundamentally different to having an
aggregation of individuated bodies. Foucault emphasises the emergence of
economics with Francois Quesnay as a threshold moment, when the question of
governance of a state fundamentally shifted from the governance of things,
individuals and territory, to the governance of populations via apparatuses of
security whose governmentality extended to disciplinary mechanisms and
juridical procedures at the level of individuated bodies understood as that by
which a multiplicity can be aggregated. More crucially, the fundamental
disclosure of security reveals a new horizon for understanding ‘nature’ that on
the one hand opens the space for thinking the human as a natural species at the
level of bare life, and on the other, the recognition that economic laws,
governed by probability and statistics, introducing norms and normativity, are
fundamentally natural laws, but a nature that hitherto totally escaped the
sovereign gaze or sovereign control.
This lacuna within
which sovereignty loses its powers opens what Foucault names as the crisis of
governmentality that has constituted modernity’s fundamental understanding of
the state, and the regulatory frameworks by which individuals become productive
and things are made. Within the frameworks for his lecture series, Foucault
identifies four general features of apparatuses of security: spaces of
security; treatments of the uncertain; forms of normalisation, and,
predominantly, correlations between security and population: “Population is
undoubtedly an idea and a reality that is absolutely modern in relation to the
functioning of political power, but also in relation to knowledge and political
theory prior to the eighteenth century.”[48] Spaces of security refer to probabilities of
temporal events, to what is uncertain within a given space. This may be
contrasted with discipline’s hierarchy and distribution of elements and
sovereign power’s centralising of an ideal order. Clearly, in the planning and
executing of things and functions, one has traces of all three, though what has
predominated from the nineteenth century is the abstract nature of the economic
and probabilistic understanding of things in their normativity and techniques
of normalisation. It is precisely this predominance in the nineteenth century
that opened the space for design as that which names the circumstances of these
apparatuses and well as the techniques by which disciplinary mechanisms and
juridical procedures of normalisation may operate. In as much as apparatuses of
security focus precisely on what is uncertain within a given space and the
probabilities of particular temporal events, we recognise the extent to which
Foucault, in keeping with Heidegger, recognises the space-time of event, a
spacing and temporalising to be engaged with ontologically, for Heidegger as Ereignis, Enowning, and for Foucault as evenmentielle, roughly and awkwardly
translated as ‘eventalisation.’
Foucault encounters
this trajectory in an understanding of the biopolitical in terms of the
predominant emergence of security as the crisis of the political, or
governmentality. Heidegger reads this trajectory in terms of the oblivion of
being in the planetary ordering of beings as the producing of the already
consumed disposal of beings. I am suggesting that what brings these two into
the most striking relation is a recognition of the emergence of design as that
which, in Foucauldian terms, becomes the strategic and tactical procedures of a
micro-politics of production and normativity and ontologically becomes the
systemic orderability that Heidegger first named Enframing and that he
subsequently names replaceability and disposability. What we currently name
sustainability is that with which security has always already been concerned from
the moment of its threshold of appearance, as well as encompassing what would
be the current disclosure of the being of beings in the already disposed
pre-apprehension of replaceability, as that which constitutes the essence of
productionist metaphysics. If Heidegger recognises in Enframing the
unconcealing of Enowning, what for Foucault is revealed with what he recognises
as the crisis of governmentality, and in what manner might this open history in
the ‘cleave’ of be-ing? What is this crisis of governmentality and its bearing
on design and design history?
The object of Foucault’s
research at this time was to develop what he termed “a history of governmental
reason,” in order to develop a genealogy of the modern state: “Society,
economy, population, security and freedom are the elements of the new
governmentality whose forms we can still recognise in its contemporary
modifications.”[49]
Each of these elements emerges during the eighteenth century and together they
constitute, at the level of the understanding of the state, something
fundamentally irreconcilable. This
“something irreconcilable” becomes the precise understanding of what is to be
governed. It opens the space for the biopolitical, for what Agamben has
analysed as bare life. On the one hand,
there is maintained from seventeenth century Mercantilism an understanding of
sovereign power as a relation between the body of the sovereign and that which
is to be governed. The fundamental ground of the social contract was constituted
on this basis as a sovereign compact between individuals, as if the essential
nature of government was based on individuated right and reciprocal obligation.
On the other hand, Foucault stresses that the elements of population, security
and economics constitutes a fundamentally new ‘nature’ that escapes the
mechanisms of governance perfected in the seventeenth century, and that will
come to constitute the grounds for liberalism.
There is a more essential nature than that of individuals in their freedom
and reason. This more essential nature
is human being as a species and object of regulatory mechanisms at the level of
population. With respect to government, the question that emerges from the
eighteenth century and is still with us, is the question of how much
government. At what point does the state become an obstacle to the
governmentality of populations? Is there too much or too little government? At
what point will the state transform into a transparent civil society no longer
requiring governance? How is population, with its own laws of transformation,
constitutive of a permanent revolution of the state? How are we to reconcile an
understanding of individuated rights of humanisms with the rights of the
governed? Or, how does the state justify its imposed limits to liberalism,
where laissez-faire constitutes a
fundamental horizon for apparatuses of security?
Can we give a
precise name to this space of the political developed by Foucault as that which
circumscribes the crisis of governmentality, as making certain what appears
uncertain within a specific temporal horizon? At the level of an
instrumentalism of ends and means that coincides with the calculative
rationality of a Cartesian “I think,” coupled with the archival imperative of
the statistical as the factual ground of the positivities of probability, we
may recognise the framing of “design” as a complex of practices whose emergence
coincides with this crisis and whose genealogy is inescapable from it. And if the crisis of governmentality operates
in a space bounded by two sets of intersecting relations: firstly, those of
agents: inalienable right as sovereign power, opposed to the rights of the
governed, understood as economic interests and, secondly, those of practices:
liberal practices constitutive of an horizon of freedom opposed to coercions
constituted in state intervention, then we can perhaps suggest that design’s
imperative becomes the sustainability of this bounded space in its
irresolution. Sustainability, understood genealogically, is the name we can
give to a political crisis of design, understood as the impossible project of
the completion of the state in and as its radical elimination. What Foucault’s
analyses show is that in considering the governmentality of design we are required to suspend our habitual
understandings of sovereign right, human agency and rationalities of truth. And
in the radicality of this questioning we are able to recognise that the
question of sustainability is not something recently thought as a forward
movement in the context of planetary crises, but rather the question of
sustainability, in the notion of security, constituted the open horizon for the
first effective practices of the global as such. In this, and from the
perspective of the governmentality of design, sustainability names that crisis,
while sustainability-design constitutes its fundamental procedures.
Mark Jackson is Associate Professor of Design in the School of Art and Design at AUT University in the Faculty of Design and Creative Technologies at AUT University. His published work ranges across design history and theory, the visual arts, film and media as well as architecture and landscape architecture. He has had a number of film and video works exhibited internationally. His current research focus is on ethics and design cultures.
[1] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (trans. Joan Stambaugh)
[2] See Foucault ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’ in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (ed. Donald Bouchard)
[3] Heidegger ‘The Question Concerning Technology’
in The Question Concerning Technology and
Other Essays (trans. William Lovitt)
[4] See Stuart Elden Mapping the Present: Heidegger, Foucault and the Project of a Spatial
History
[5] I would also suggest, though not develop in this paper, that the ontology of design cannot be extricated from the issues of spatial ontology as developed by Heidegger and approached historically by Foucault in his histories of spaces of confinement and governmentality.
[6] Foucault The Uses of Pleasure
(trans. Robert Hurley)
[7] Ibid., pp. 6-7.
[8] Ibid., p. 9.
[9] Hubert Dreyfus ‘On the Ordering of
Things: Being and Power in Heidegger and Foucault’ in Michel Foucault: Philosopher (trans. Timothy J. Armstrong)
[10] See Foucault ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy,
History’ op. cit., pp. 139-164.
[11] See Giorgio Agamben Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life
(trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen) Stanford:
[12] Heidegger, Being and Time op. cit., p. 333.
13 Ibid.,, p. 345. With respect to ‘care’ it is important to ask if Foucault’s use of the notion coincides with Heidegger’s. Although ‘care’ is for Heidegger in Being and Time the primordial disclosure of being-in-the-world, the notion of ‘care’ needs to be understood much more in terms of taking care of things, being underway with things or doing things. Da-sein is always already caring for things in this sense. Heidegger did not particularly mean ‘care’ in any moral or ethical sense. While Da-sein is primordially being-in the world, it is also equi-primordially being with others. Heidegger employs the word ‘concern’ for the primordial disclosure of Da-sein’s being-with. In this sense, there is no direct correspondence with the notion of care used by Foucault. However, it is also worth mentioning that Heidegger does not refer to the care-structure of Da-sein explicitly again after Being and Time, and moves away from the disclosure of being in an ontological engagement with human being, in favour of a question of the meaning of being. After Being and Time, Da-sein will be displaced by a question of the truth of being. For Foucault, the ‘care’ expressed in the care of the self engages Foucault much more in an ontological questioning of techne in its relation to practices of a self. In this Foucault is moving from concerns with historical a priori that construed his understanding of subjection in the formation of selves, to what he termed subjectivisation, as a care of or concern for the self: those threshold moments of a kind of surplus, where concerns with well-being overtake those of survival. See Care of the Self op. cit., p. 216.
[14] Ibid., p. 355.
[15] Ibid., p. 362. Also quoted in Elden, Mapping the Present, op. cit. p. 13
[16] See Gilles Deleuze Foucault (trans.
Sean Hand)
[17] Foucault Uses of Pleasure op. cit., pp. 10-11.
[18] One thinks here of the short Foucault essay on Maurice
Blanchot, Thought from the Outside,
which is how Deleuze poses the efficacy
of Foucault’s third ontology of self, and that radical interiority that thinks
the outside of thought or what is yet to be thought.See Michel Foucault and
Maurice Blanchot Foucault/Blanchot (trans.
Jeffrey Mehlman and Brian Massumi) New York: Zone Books, 1987.
[19] Foucault Uses of Pleasure op. cit., p. 8.
[20]
Foucault, ‘The Order of Discourse’ in The
Archaeology of Knowledge (trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith)
[21] Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ op. cit. See esp. p. 19 ff.
[22] Heidegger Being and Time op. cit.
[23] Heidegger, Four Seminars (trans. Andrew Mitchell and Francois Raffoul)
[24] Ibid., p. 41.
[25] Ibid., p. 43.
[26] Ibid., p. 61.
[27] Ibid, p. 41. On the topology of be-ing, see in
particular Jeff Malpas, Heidegger's
Topology: Being, Place, World
[28] Heidegger, ‘The Principle of Identity’ in Identity and Difference (trans. Joan
Stambaugh)
[29] Heidegger Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning) (trans. Parvis Emad and
Kenneth Maly)
[30] Ibid., p. xix. This quotation originally
appears in Heidegger’s lecture ‘The Principle of Identity’ op. cit., where he
is discussing the difficulty of the notion of Ereignis that plays a crucial role in his understanding of the
Parmenidean fragment “Thinking and being belong together in the Same.”
[31] Heidegger Four
Seminars op. cit., p. 61.
[32] Ibid., p. xi. A Deleuzian reading of Heidegger
might understand this as the univocity of being, as the pure immanence of
being. See Gilles Deleuze, Difference and
Repetition (trans. Paul Patton)
[33] Heidegger Four Seminars
op. cit., p. 61.
[34] Ibid.
[35] Ibid.
[36] Ibid., p. 62.
[37] Ibid., pp. 62-63.
[38] Ibid., p. 63.
[39] See ‘The Principle of Identity’ op. cit. This text in particular emphasises the ‘leap’ into being.
[40] Heidegger, Parmenides (trans. Andre Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz)
[41] Ibid., p. 151.
[42] Heidegger
Contributions to Philosophy, op. cit., p. 71.
[43] Foucault
Uses of Pleasure op. cit., p. 11.
[44] Foucault Security,
Territory, Population op. cit., p. 1.
[45] On Heidegger ‘sacrificing’ beings
for being, see Jacques Derrida, Of
Spirit: Heidegger and the Question (trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachael
Bowlby)
[46] Ibid., p. 5.
[47] Ibid.
[48] Ibid., p. 11.
[49] Foucault Security,
Territory, Population op. cit., p. 354.