Keith Owens

 

A review essay of Design as  Politics by Tony Fry (Oxford: Berg, 2011, 301 pages)

 

Author and design theorist Tony Fry recently released Design as Politics. The book packs a wallop and extends the thinking Fry voiced in two earlier works, A New Design Philosophy (1999) and Design Futuring (2009). In his latest effort, Fry knits a rich tapestry of rigorous argumentation out of diverse strands of thinking situated outside the mainstream of environmental theory and philosophy — e.g., philosophers Foucault, Heidegger, Levinas and Latour, political theorist Carl Schmitt, economist Joseph Schumpeter, sociologist Theodor W. Adorno and many others. Interestingly though, he couches his philosophical stance in rhetoric that often evokes the eschatological tenor, dystopian polemics and fundamental reorientations more typically associated with apocalyptical forms of environmental discourse.

Put simply, in Design as Politics Fry poses a problem as large as the world and challenges designers as makers, builders, planners and activists to consider how they might respond. What should they do to remake a status quo that summons an epoch when a depleted planet, pushed beyond its recuperative ability, becomes hostile to life, and lives worth living? Fry argues that designers should answer this challenge by transforming themselves into politicised change agents who will confront blinkered forms of ecological thinking and who can overturn many long established and deeply entrenched political, economic, ideological and technological foundations upon which rest human’s current self-negating ways.

Fry begins his exposition by examining what he considers the current unsustainable state of affairs. He looks unflinchingly at humanity’s impending finitude and points out the weaknesses in current solutions to the ‘structural unsustainability’ hastening this fate. This status quo with which Fry takes strong exception and challenges with rousing calls to action draws in large measure from three interlocking constructs: liberal democracy, unrecognised human anthropocentrism and a widespread but ill-founded faith in technological salvation. Fry dives deeply into nuanced, recursive critiques of each, singly and relationally, repeatedly resurfacing with keen insights into and heterodox responses to the three. Importantly, these critiques all rest upon an early distinction Fry draws between the political and politics.[1]

For Fry, politics is a circumscribed activity expressed through institutionalised practices exercised by individuals, groups and sovereign powers. And in its many contemporary forms, politics is increasingly blind to its fundamental ‘defuturing’ agency and propensity to inflict grave damage on the material world. Conversely, the political is a wider sphere of activity “embedded in the directive structures of society and in the conduct of humans as ‘political animals’.”[2]  This distinction is significant because design as political, rather than designing for institutionalised  politics, affords designers — those who transform ‘the world’ into ‘a world’ — with the means to prefigure and shape individual, social and economic behavior. Properly understood, design as a politics is in its own right a largely invisible but nonetheless pervasive structuring force available to any designer working to invent a more durable future, Fry’s ‘Sustainment.’

Building on this distinction, Fry contends that liberal democracy as institutionalised political system is incapable of delivering this ‘Sustainment’ or any interdependent condition of responsible, ‘futural’ existence and post-Enlightenment antidote to the structural unsustainability that flows from the human disposition toward ‘defuturing’ — the desire to fulfill present wants with scant thought to future needs. That modern democratic governance,[3] subordinate to capital and neutral to ultimate ends, is ill equipped to cope with the looming ‘age of unsettlement.’[4] In its present form democratic governance is contributing to rather than averting the coming of “a breakdown of the rule of order globally, economic disruption on an unprecedented scale [and] cascading ecological disaster … [precipitating the] redistribution of a significant segment of the human population.”[5] Fry attributes democracy’s deficiency and culpability to a number of causes and beliefs, some more apparent, others less so.

Closer to the surface of mainstream understandings, Fry asserts that democracy’s impotence in the face of biophysical crises can be ascribed in part to its degeneration into a ‘consumer democracy.’ As an institution it now feeds the demands made by a voracious media and distracted electorate by devolving important issues and debates into simplistic “forms that appeal to base interests”[6] or sensationalising false dichotomies that diminish the possibility of informed choice. Moreover, Fry believes that democracy abets structural unsustainability by virtue of its symbiotic relationship with free market capitalism. Together, the two ideologically driven and increasingly interlocked systems bracket forms of governance totally committed to economic growth, to globalization as the guarantor of a just world and to consumption as an expression of personal liberty. The unsustainable result of this neo-liberal ‘consumerist sovereignty’ is both material — the recognised but unchallenged acceleration of irreversible resource depletion, and socio-political — the increasing possibility of a world destabilised by gross inequalities in distributive justice or unrealistic beliefs in what constitutes the necessities of modern life.

Tunneling deeper into his critique of democracy Fry suggests that beyond its modern political instantiation, some of the institution’s cherished principles are intrinsically untenable in the face of structural unsustainability. For Fry, modern liberalism, with its commitment to absolute individualism and positive economic rights, is a negation of those (non-market) goods only available through and the result of shared efforts. Analogously, freedom conceived in negative form — free to be — is antithetical to the needed ‘environmental commons’ that can only exist by imposed limits on human action. Quoting Levinas, “we must impose commands on ourselves in order to be free.”[7] Further, Fry posits pluralism as a construct that reduces difference to equivalence, holds whomever it gathers as atomized individuals rather than fostering a ‘commonality in difference’ and tolerates imprudent contradiction, allowing both unsustainable and sustainable policies and practices and lifestyles.

Fry argues that while many aspects of modern democratic theory and practice exist separated by a wide divide, they nonetheless are collectively ill-suited to cope with the results of their joint role in creating structural unsustainability. Argues Fry, “Democracy cannot deliver Sustainment, an agenda of “the future of the future…”[8]  Viewed as ineffective and culpable, the democratic apparatus represents one component contributing to a fatally flawed status quo. The second is the self-inflicted blindness occluding our anthropocentrism’s destructive capacity.

“To be human is to be anthropocentric and to be anthropocentric is to be violent — here is the core of human violence. To confront what we are and to take responsibility for it means we are effectively at war with ourselves …”[9] By suggesting that by their base nature humans are not merely self-serving but innately destructive, Fry argues that environmental problems are less a matter of a material or technological concern and more a problem of moral reflexivity and political will. This formulation yields important corollaries. From our auto-destructiveness, our “monstrous nature”[10] ‘we’ cannot escape by externalising our defect but from the blindness that surrounds it, we must. Individually, humans should strive to recognise the ontological duality of their nature, however painful this realisation may be. Socially, communities of committed change agents should, as Fry suggests, drawing from Schmitt’s ‘friend/enemy’ distinction,[11] distinguish between those who support the ‘Sustainment’ and those who do not. Politically, activist citizens should confront the selfish atomism that democratic liberalism promotes with more selfless ways of being. For Fry, humans must recognise their anthropocentrism, but they can no more escape their essence than they can annul it with their misplaced faith in technology — the third support upon which the modern status quo rides.

Fry suggests that much contemporary faith in technological salvation arises out of a historical legacy of pre-Socratic thought about productivism, religious conviction in the ‘right’ to treat nature instrumentally and the Enlightenment legacy of control through calculative reason. Unconscious anthropocentrism and technological infatuation have collectively fused these diverse foundations into a singular undisputed belief that humans can not only triumph over nature but by dint of their technological prowess buffer themselves from the consequences that ensue from their campaign for domination. ‘Green technology’ movements typify this modern optimistic view[12] and the accompanying conviction that structural unsustainability is a problem not caused by but solved with technology. This modern taken-for-granted belief crowds out other important understandings. Critical among them is that insofar as technology remains under human control, it continues to embody and amplify human anthropocentric desires thus hastening rather than hindering the self-destruction created by these unacknowledged dispositions.

Further, Fry contends that rather than a vessel for human salvation, modern technology is becoming a semi-autonomous power with a desire to survive on its own terms. For him and others,[13] technology is Nietzsche’s ‘will to power’ reified as a ‘will-to-will’ in auto-replicating techno-structures that now frame (Heidegger’s gestell) and ontologically shape human destiny. Because the technologies humans invent silently fold back onto them and direct their bodies, work, culture, environments and futures, they become a “neutering[14] and should be subjected to political critique not accepted as a matter of faith. instrument of human agency”

Moving forward in his narrative, Fry asserts that if humans are to have a livable future, not only must this destructive status quo be overturned but also that designers of all types should lead its transformation into a post-Democratic “basis [for all] human conduct”[15]  and a more sustaining form of sovereignty.

These linked disputations raise important questions. Foremost among them is the question of why is designing the axial agency out of which better futures can be forged? What is it about design that Fry believes should grant it an increased say in how the future is shaped? Correspondingly, are the provocative remedies fashioned by design for which Fry argues reasonable? Fry supports his argument for design’s deeper involvement in a new politic and ‘futuring’ on ontological and moral grounds.

Ontologically, Fry contends that design’s ‘making’ power and the role its practitioners play when called upon to employ it deeply implicate design in creating futures. Because of design and by design humans now live in a highly mediated world, one where that which is natural (non man-made) no longer touches humans before first passing through some type of designed artifice. This carapace surrounds humanity, helps to shape their animal nature (zoe) into humanity (bios) and is a reality from which they cannot ‘be’ otherwise. Moreover, this ground for being, intentionally created and with particular ends in mind, is not neutral. Rather, design gives material expression to ideological landscapes that prefigure particular forms of living, moving, gathering, expression and connecting. Everyday, everywhere, humans make their lives out of designed artifacts, systems and environments in which are lodged adamant beliefs and contentions about what constitutes a life worth living. As Fry suggests, the current clash between western and Islamic cultures is but one example of how two worlds shaped by design violently contest notions of the good. Nor is the present and its troubles self-contained, for design shapes a moving ‘now’ that inexorably casts itself forward to construct what is to come.

Fry’s ontological argument flows into a moral corollary. Since design cannot escape from its role in creating future worlds and the inevitable destruction that accompanies these births, it has a distinctive moral obligation to the larger whole and is therefore responsible for helping to extend our collective ‘finitude.’ Designers’ ontological centrality to creative destruction compels them to transcend the blinkered ‘inadequate solutions of now’ by actualising a new vision for what constitutes future flourishing for all.

In the latter sections of his book, Fry suggest one way to fulfill this obligation: a new design politic through and with which designers can break their bondage to an unsustainable status quo, replacing it instead with an alternative allegiance to the ‘Sustainment’ and to an “… economic and socio-cultural re-construction that … transcend[s] the ways ‘we’ destroy our worlds and each other, treat everything as a ‘standing reserve’ at our disposal – and allow the powerful to unjustly treat the powerless.”[16] . But how should designers (and like minded allies) accomplish this mandate? Out of what material should they hew this surely arduous path to a more durable future? Fry suggests that the campaign for genuine change must be waged on many fronts both within and without — self-conceptions, organizing institutions and seminal beliefs in human rights.

Critically, designers must change their basic understanding of the source of immanent geophysical strife. That at its center, the ‘common sense’ ideology underpinning outward facing ways of thinking about environmentalism and sustainability is flawed. Characterising problems such as climate change, shrinking forests or acid rain as spontaneously occurring or ‘natural’ processes merely provides an alibi for the true culprits, “six-and-a-half billion technologically hyper-extended, super consuming beings.”[17] Any livable future must originate not in external fixes — technological or otherwise — but in the awareness that ‘we’ are the source of our impending unsettlement. Human anthropocentrism is inescapable. Therefore, designers (and others generally with assistance from design) should admit to and take responsibility for their inherently disruptive nature, remake themselves into responsible beings willing to destroy all that which cannot sustain, and subordinate their imprudent self-interest to a larger trans-human common good.

Fry believes designers can help bring about this transformation through ‘redirective practice.’ This futural behavior is modeled for others both individually and through ‘change communities’ bent on living sustainably, retrofitting the current material world to mitigate its negative future impact and pursuing cultural Bildung — the construction of ontological designs — to contribute to future time. Fry grounds his suggestions for these new forms of design responsibility and agency by presenting case studies selectively throughout the book. Examples include recent design-led international efforts to relocate 20,000 economically displaced residents of the Swedish town Malmberget and the seeding of a vitally needed creative industry in the historically troubled and newly independent nation of Timor-Leste.

Beyond recasting themselves and their practices, Fry also maintains that designers should move beyond the private economic and social domain within which they have traditionally operated, venturing forth not to engage with the sharp elbowed realm of institutional politics but to mount a campaign to displace them. Designers should foment disruptive change to the current political praxis by creating an alternative governing imaginary and economic reality, a new politics of design.

This distinction remains important because Fry believes liberal market democracy as an institutionalised political system is defective — ideologically unable and economically unwilling to face its involvement in creating that which cannot sustain.  Thus, designers must build and advocate for a new governing structure to replace what has become an untenable way of being. Democracy’s replacement is a new politic that stands in contrast to the current status quo and folds into a larger project — the establishment of the ‘dictatorship of Sustainment.’ This implies a system of governance that is willing to overwrite liberal forms of procedural democracy and neoliberal economic ideology with a strict ‘formative’ commitment to a particular common good that spans the human and non-human, the artificial and natural, the economic and social.

Fry does not believe this dictatorship can assume power ex nihilo. Rather, it’s foundational legitimacy (e.g., the right to compel action) and ultimate sovereignty (e.g., to hold bare life in check by law) will grow organically out of a recognized need to impose universal legal, regulatory and governing structures able to limit the planetary chaos riding along with the approaching ‘unsettlement.’ According to Fry, design would play a central role in creating this emergent awareness by inventing an “expansive relational picture that situates … our political institutions centrally as, and in, the problem(s).”[18] Through their politics, designers could delegitimise existing political and economic structures, create egalitarian ‘unfreedoms’, position the ‘Sustainment’ as a counter narrative to sustainability and celebrate a new sovereignty “… able to direct human being beyond itself.”[19]

Fry also tempers this call for benign authoritarianism in the service of ‘futuring’ by suggesting that while it imposes a singular goal — ‘Sustainment’ — it is a dictatorship that would nonetheless recognize variation in circumstance, culture and climate. He also suggests that in his new world the imposition of personal limits would occur through the design of material and socio-political artifacts, systems and experiences rather than by force. He advocates for a politic that imposes its will by shaping the ‘artificial’ in ways that create and sustain more responsible human beliefs, exchange, expectations and behavior.

In calling for this new directive, Fry is not naive about human nature. He recognises that substantive change will not occur out of “mass individual self-enlightenment or out of liberal democratic popularism… [and that] … electorates are unlikely to vote for substantial sacrifice, for limits, for sumptuary laws.”[20] Therefore citizens, their governments and their market must be persuaded, by design, “to give way to the sovereignty of Sustainment and impose it as law.”[21]  

As he readily admits the steep price Fry contends be paid for future planetary flourishing is controversial — elected governments relinquishing sovereignty, citizens relinquishing autonomy and markets relinquishing dominance. Nevertheless, Fry believes there is no other viable option if humans are to overcome structural unsustainability at a scale necessary to guarantee our future. Not satisfied with radical transformation to design practice and democratic governance, however, Fry challenges designers to venture into the realm of ideas to instigate for change there too.

Fry examines the idea of individual freedom, and through his intricate critiques of the concept he advances the need for its limitation by design practice.  In Fry’s nuanced argument, the Enlightenment and the thinking surrounding the concept of the ‘natural rights of man’ constructed the free individual as the minimum unit of value within western society.  No longer did communal relationship, social standing or hereditary position calculate human worth.  Rather individuals became autonomous masters of their own destiny, free to pursue personal life, liberty and happiness.  Over time liberalism’s central concern with the rights of the individual translated into their right to claim and to dispose of that to which they were entitled.  This meant that what was once held in common such as duty to others, interdependency with the larger community and the commitment to future generations were also disposable.  Later, Democracy became neutral toward end consequences — allowing autonomous citizens to pursue their individual destinies unimpeded by notions of the common good beyond national integrity, restricted forms of distributive justice and a rule of law that promised equal access to, if no assurance of, economic liberty.

Countering this deeply entrenched belief, Fry argues that rights are not intrinsic but instead metaphysical claims humans grant to themselves. Correspondingly “nobody has the ‘right’ to exploit, pollute, waste resources, wage war, seriously damage the planet’s atmosphere, turn design into an insatiable hunger for commodities, act to eliminate plans and animal species.”[22] Operating under this ideology, designers should work to design new ‘unfreedoms’ by exploiting design’s sway over the material world to create mechanisms that limit the individual’s freedom to exercise unsustainable actions and thereby secure for all the commonly held freedom of a livable future. Ultimately for Fry, the ‘dictatorship of Sustainment,’ brought into being and empowered by design, is the only way to control anthropocentrism, impose political limits that encourage humans to ‘become otherwise’ and reshape the conditions of human freedom. His vision of the new politic becomes the overarching guarantor of a more tenable present and durable future.

Fry’s apocalyptic ecological vision and corresponding call for wrenching socio-political transformation is tightly argued, compelling and provocative, as is his challenge to designers to trade their economic service for political action, abandon convention and question liberal democracy, dismiss the sunny fanfare livening environmental debate and replace it with the certainty of human finitude. His argument reflects more radicalised environmental rhetoric and would be, for environmental gradualists, technological utopians or democratic libertarians, highly contestable. It is therefore not at all surprising that many designers, and others with whom they might ally, would respond to his arguments and calls to action with varying modes of skepticism and doubts woven out of concerns about urgency, nature, legitimacy, impracticality and tyranny.

 Suggesting that rash action taken in the absence of certain knowledge might result in more harm than good, environmental gradualists will argue that Fry’s urgent fears about impending reckonings are overblown and question whether current understanding of planetary dynamics warrants the cost of rapid and disruptive change. Others who, for reasons arising out of unrecognized anthropocentrism, might acknowledge climactic change would nonetheless maintain that humans are most likely not the principle cause. That aberrant weather, increasing planetary temperatures and rising oceans are merely the result of normally occurring, long-term planetary cycles. Any design challenge consists in helping humans adapt to a fickle environment, not altering their nature or agency. Similarly, technological materialists who recognize biophysical change assert that the roots of our predicament do not lie within. Rather, they emerge from the clumsy application by humans of systems, technologies and policy decisions — all external factors subject to rational human control and technological prowess.

Still others, including environmental activists, might suggest that Fry’s arguments for design-led transformation are misdirected and perhaps even hubristic. Any ecological calamity that may occur will involve brute reality of such scale and intensity that the scientific community, for whom natural phenomenon and its control are central, and policy makers, to whom society looks for large scale solutions, bear the major responsibility for leading meaningful change. Thus, while concern by designers is commendable, design itself does not possess a legitimate claim or the necessary power to transform the status quo.

Finally, more than a few politically minded groups working to promote ecological responsibility and who would welcome design into their fold might nonetheless strongly object to some of Fry’s recommended end solutions in particular his ‘dictatorship of the sustainment’ and his call for modifications to deeply enshrined notions of human rights. A major contention with Fry’s solutions is that ‘world governance’ or a check on harmful (but nonetheless lawful) human agency would be deeply counterproductive, impossible to mandate, unenforceable using current jurisprudence, impotent in the face of multiculturalism and ultimately tyrannical if realised — a political environment as hostile to human flourishing as anything nature could possibly inflict. In the end, however, simply weighing the verity or speciousness of these warring arguments — whose contentions should carry the day or whose facts are more irrefutable — might lead to a sense of surety but also diverts attention from the deeper significance of Fry’s book.

For many reasons beyond its rhetorical force, Design as Politics richly rewards a close and considered read. The book is revelatory. It exposes readers to often critiqued but (for Fry) deeply misunderstood behaviors, ideals and institutions. His recursive inquest spirals deeply though anthropocentrism, structural unsustainability, faith in technological salvation and the hollow ph  hromise democracy constructs out of economic liberty, pluralism, liberalism and freedom. By exploring the contradictions lurking below our modern zeitgeist, Fry upends the seemingly logical relationship existing between reasonableness and rationality and exposes dark corners of flawed ideology deeply embedded in our institutions, our works and us. His critical interrogation of naturalised and potentially destructive ways of being-in-the-world force readers to confront the foundations upon which they construct the dispositions, biases and actions that will ultimately shape the future for better or worse.

The book is relevant. Readers are reminded that a stressed biosphere becoming increasingly more hostile to humans intensifies the need to find viable ways to ensure planetary flourishing. Fry argues convincingly that rising oceans, dying forests and harsh climates suggest that it is madness to wait complacently as a rapidly approaching global ‘unsettlement’ arrives to displace millions, spark resource wars and irreparably rend the socio-environmental fabric that knits together terrestrial life and wellbeing. His apocalyptic characterisations of impending human finitude and the radical political responses for which he advocates to forestall it are contestable. Nonetheless, Fry’s forceful warnings about an increasingly tenuous future should not be ignored.

The book is bold. Fry suggests the need for a wholesale rejection of consumerist democracy, the global free-market system and anthropocentric thinking. In this urgent call he joins with other political, economic and environmental activists. Unfortunately, his position places him at odds with many mainstream design thinkers who see ‘sustainable’ solutions in market and environmental alignment or hear design’s political voice sounding from within rather than outside of institutionalised politics.[23] Moreover, while there is certainly nothing timid in his argument that sovereign states should relinquish power to the ‘dictatorship of Sustainment,’ the real daring (for design) comes from Fry’s belief that designers should take power by politicising their unavoidable role in making a world. Believing that institutional politics are ineffectual and market systems destructive, Fry calls for a transformational political imaginary. For Fry, this new design politic would be forged out of design’s innate ability to materially shape behavior and values rather than any supportive engagement with extant political forms. In this, Fry recalibrates what it means to act politically as a designer — political will and expression by virtue of making rather than through participation, creation instead of representation.

The book is useful. Fry bolsters his arguments with close philosophical argumentation grounded in real world case studies of transformative design practice. Through this pairing Fry’s exposition provides theoretically minded readers with an effective means to understand complex problems and practitioners with actualised concrete examples of complex ideology. Moreover, through his case studies Fry presents critical instances of the types of problems that can grow out of blinkered anthropocentrism, consumerist democracy and structural unsustainability, offering examples of three critical factors — problem sourcing, seeking and solving — of vital import to designer theorists and practitioners attempting to frame thinking and forge  practice beyond design’s traditional ambit.

Finally, the book is important. There are few design theorists or writers attempting to understand and helping their peers to understand the nature and scope of unsustainability as adamantly as Fry. He represents the sharp edge of environmental discourse and exhibits no qualms about slicing deeply into comforting convention, unexamined ideology and vacuous solutions. This unrelenting bravery in the face of pervasive economic inertia and myopic self-righteousness is critical. Our collective wellbeing depends on writers like Fry who continue to provoke sharp thought, dispel pernicious myths and rouse designers and other makers of ‘things’ to help transform our collective future into one that sustains rather than diminishes.

 

 
Keith Owens is an associate professor of communication design at the University of North Texas College of Visual Arts and Design and the director of the college's Design Research Center (DRC). He has worked on a number of socially-focused design projects and written many articles addressing the need for increased design responsibility.