BY ADAM NOCEK
“Design for Multiple Worlds” is a phrase that has gained some currency in the fields of design research and practice associated with autonomous and pluriversal design in Latin America, as well as decolonial and post-development anthropology, ontological design, and critical design studies generally. Together, these diverse modes of practice and inquiry have served as a rallying cry for designers and activists who seek to resist the naturalization of the onto-epistemologies of the Global North and place design at the center of the modern/colonial project as such. This is because design it is at once an exemplary product of global modernity and for this reason a prime candidate for un/re-designing the political ontology of this colonizing project.
Put simply, design for multiple worlds (which in many ways is synonymous with design for the pluriverse [Escobar 2018]) proposes that there is not one universe of value and meaning capable of legislating what does and does not count as a relevant world- building activity. In this context, design is conceived of as immanent to a community’s autonomous modes of creation and maintenance (communities are autopoietic); and these modes are irreducible to and do not require the legitimation of modern dualist (colonialist) frames of reference (whether legitimation comes in the form of the state apparatus, flexible neoliberal economies, computational tools, or universalizing notions of the subject/object, etc.). While there are a growing number of especially illustrative examples of autonomous world building in Latin America, in Indigenous communities, as well as in radical black activism and in Afro-pessimism, as a philosopher of design and technology I want to draw attention to certain philosophical allies (who might be considered a part of a genealogy of the “alternative West” [Escobar 2018: 102]) in the struggle to design for multiple worlds.
In an effort to make the importance of these conceptual partnerships explicit, it’s worth emphasizing just how easy it is to let modern/colonial dualisms sneak in when we’re not actively resisting their intrusion. This is because many of these dualisms are borne out of the habitual fabric of our modern (linguistic) technologies of thought and practice. For example, take the preposition “for” in designs for multiple worlds. In English, the preposition “for” designates design’s use or purpose: namely, to promote or enable multiple worlds to co-exist (or what modern design must renounce in order to exist). The difficulty here, and what makes design for multiple worlds a radical departure from the politics of modernity/coloniality, is that the content of these worlds cannot be determined in advance in order to ensure their co-existence (they cannot be framed according to a Hegelian politics of reciprocity, for instance). Otherwise, the multiple is circumscribed within a horizon of the same, since the terms of agreement have been articulated in advance. Under such conditions, the logic (along with all the failures) of Western liberal multiculturalism is reproduced, and this maintains the colonial power relations that autonomous struggles aim to undermine (see Coulthard 2014).
What we must struggle to put forward, then, is a mode of design that does not propose to answer for or speak on behalf of the many worlds it helps to fabricate. This is a design that is “problematizing” in the sense that Gilles Deleuze uses the term (Deleuze 1994). To suggest that design is a problematizing (and not a solution-driven) field means that it resists the temptation to (re)solve tensions and contrasts between and among worlds (by imposing the terms of an agreement) or even to presume what tensions these worlds would be capable of producing. Rather, design conditions the emergence of worlds that cannot be framed within a coherent whole; it leaves them in problematic tension.
Put differently, design does not aim to fabricate multiple perspectives on the same Nature. There is no transcendental ground (called Nature, the Cosmos, the Universe, etc.) to unify or draw divergence together into some tidy resolution. If anything, we’re dealing with a mode of design that aims at something much closer to what Eduardo Viveiros de Castro means by “multinaturalism” (as opposed to Occidental multiculturalism), although there are no prescribed methods, techniques, or technologies for bringing these multiple natures into existence. What I am suggesting here about design for multiple worlds (as a species of multinaturalism) should not be thought of in terms of “lack” or “deficiency,” however—that is, as a design theory and practice that is deficient in both form and content. Rather, this is a speculative proposition that imagines the existence of a design capable of forging interstitial spaces within the colonial matrix of power in order to generate immanent instead of transcendent sites for the creation of multiple natures. It does so by resisting the temptation to prescribe what these natures are and how they are going to be brought into existence.
Such a speculative space for design also shares a good deal with what the speculative philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, says about the aesthetic: namely, that an aesthetic achievement is what lures (without a definite goal or end) an emergent subject to draw maximum environmental contrast together (without reducing or explaining it away) into its own autonomous and relational formation quasubject. To think of the political and ontological project of designing for multiple worlds as aesthetic certainly requires much more unpacking. And yet, it seems worth entertaining whether Whitehead’s conception of the aesthetic lure for irreducible contrast without a definite end or goal in mind, would be capable of establishing a meaningful conceptual partnership with the decolonial and pluriversal design work outlined here. Much as Heidegger became a meaningful touchstone for ontological and autonomous design, so too I wonder whether Whitehead and Deleuze could become important interlocutors in the shift from design solutions to design problematics in the ongoing struggle to design for multiple worlds.
Coulthard, Glen Sean. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
Escobar, Arturo. Designs For the Pluriverse: Radical Independence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds(Durham: Duke University Press, 2018).
Fry, Tony. Becoming Human by Design(London: Berg, 2012).
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. Cannibal Metaphysics: For a Post-Structural Anthropology. Trans. Peter Skafish (Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2014).
Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology(New York: The Free Press, 1978 [1927-28]).
SOBRE EL AUTOR:
Adam Nocek es profesor asistente de filosofía de la tecnología y estudios de ciencia y tecnología en la Escuela de Artes, Medios e Ingeniería de la Universidad Estatal de Arizona (ASU). También es el director fundador del Centro de Tecnologías Filosóficas de ASU. Nocek ha publicado ampliamente sobre filosofía de los medios y la ciencia, filosofía especulativa (especialmente Whitehead), filosofía de diseño y sobre teorías críticas y especulativas de los medios computacionales. Nocek es el coeditor de The Lure of Whitehead y acaba de completar un manuscrito titulado, Molecular Capture: Biology, Animation, and Governance. Actualmente, Nocek está trabajando en dos proyectos de libros: el primer proyecto aborda la gobernanza computacional y el surgimiento de nuevos regímenes de experiencia en diseño, y el segundo proyecto reinventa el papel de la mitología dentro de la filosofía de diseño especulativa. Nocek es también profesor visitante de la Real Academia Holandesa de las Artes y las Ciencias (KNAW) para 2019.