Towards anarchist design. An interview with Ernesto Oroza and Olivier Peyricot

Emanuele Quinz

I’d like to start with a quote from the last page of Victor Papanek’s 1970 work, Design for the Real World: “Design, if it is to be ecologically responsible and socially responsive, must be revolutionary and radical. [...] It must dedicate itself to nature’s ‘principle of least effort’, in other words, minimum inventory for maximum diversity.”³ This idea can be applied to consumer goods as well as production materials, but could it also be interpreted as a social engineering strategy? Do you also think design should be “revolutionary and radical?”

Ernesto Oroza

Radical yes, revolutionary not necessarily. Radical because design should question its principles and social role as a practice, permanently. And this questioning must be contextual and situated. Papanek’s use of the radical is consistent with his proposal of design as a synthesising practice, as opposed to the idea of a specialisation or discipline. To accept that design should be revolutionary is to reduce the possibilities of [the] response to one kind of operation. Remember, Cubans have a very specific experience with the use of the term and with concrete revolutionary practice. I believe that reformulating the question remains more important than proposing definitive solutions. Papanek himself appeals to the foundational sense of the radical (at least in my version of his book). I don’t deny that the revolution often seems to be the only way out, but once again, Revolution is a response, not a question. It is also a type of response or gesture that sacrifices or subordinates many aspects. I believe that the history of design is also a history of sacrifices. We, designers, are used to think in terms of imperatives: we sacrifice ergonomic features for aesthetic aspects or subordinate resistance to economic principles. In short, we believe it is normal to sacrifice something in the object.

Olivier Peyricot

The call to radicalism and revolution reflects the prevailing mindset of Papanek’s time. The left/right polarity of the period’s critical discourse led to these types of positions; everyone imagined potential forms of liberation behind these two watchwords. And with them, creations, forms, objects and systems that would help direct time’s path and progress. A revolution did indeed take place, but it was capitalist in nature. And now, in a period of overwhelming doubt, design is one theory among many that deal with our daily environment. But it is an environment beset with complexity and anguish and steeped in political tensions. As designers, before we can speak about being radical or revolutionary, we must first define how we approach design, and how we put it into practice. When Papanek speaks of “nature’s ‘principle of least effort’” and says he is seeking the minimum productive gesture that will result in the responsible object, I question what is behind this moral bias. It seems to me that this moral celebration of design - a recurrent theme throughout Papanek’s life - is not unlike an authoritarian blueprint for social engineering: whether it is the history of Shaker furniture, Catharine Beecher’s kitchen designs, or the ecological and social charters of design schools. In this sense, when discussing design, I’d rather invoke Ivan Illich than Papanek.

E. Q.

Are you referring to the concept of conviviality?

O. P.

In his thinking, Illich was a critical powerhouse. By deconstructing modernity through his radical reading of major systemic agencies (schools, hospitals, automobiles), he nevertheless identifies residual spaces where individuals survive by developing adaptive strategies. He calls for a reconsideration of how we read and understand our surroundings by identifying a basic principle: conviviality. I understand this as the possibility of being able to integrate a level of irresolution into the act of design. This method consists in the creator disinvesting at the level of his or her psychotic core–unlike a psychotic personality, creators can distance themselves–in order to function as a political actor, an anarchist one, for example: while the action is individual, the orientation is collective. This is the antithesis of how we are currently organised, where the individual is prioritised (the leader, whether that of a project or the State) and this is followed by collective action (cohorts, teams, subcontractors, etc.).

E. Q.

In the 1970s, Paul Feyerabend put forth a theory of epistemological anarchism.⁴ A few years prior to this, John Cage and Cornelius Cardew had attempted to apply “anarchist methods” to music. More recently, David Graeber laid the foundations for an anarchist anthropology.⁵ Can we conceive of an anarchist design–or an anarchist theory and practice of design?

O. P.

In the work of Graeber and other anarchist anthropologists, descriptions of social organisation without State structures can be found in numerous societies; they use a variety of strategies to escape statism, thereby forming anarchist societies. This goal underpins their culture and organisations, and structures their time. Graeber emphasises that the counterpower is above all found in the relationship between the practical imagination (design for daily living, one could say) and what he calls spectral violence (black magic, for example). These socially constructed oppositions are foundational and occupy much societal time. Anthropologists never cease to uncover these types of societies, which are involved in a specific manner of material production and designs for daily living. We can see a reflection of this in our own practices, above all in the search for a definition of design’s power to have an impact. Therefore the practical side of design is prioritised, whose at time accidental (and often existential) path includes projects that often don’t come to fruition–or encounters that will subsequently influence the project (service providers, users, assistants, etc.) or the hidden parts of excess (the “accursed share” in Georges Bataille’s book of the same name),⁶ etc. This externally influenced design is extremely interesting, as it allows methodology to be influenced by contingencies and otherness. To put it more simply, if we do not limit it by restricting it in the form of a dogma, discipline or morality, then it reorients allowing for interdependencies. It’s anarchist insofar as it rejects all that is implied with top-down systems - the roles of projector (design-er), or director (artistic). This is a counter-definition of design, a practice that can be influenced by third parties. For example, a designer makes an object whose colour is subsequently chosen by a subcontracted painter. Skilfully made objects handed over to another’s expertise. This departure from the original plan becomes a composite project, which corresponds to an anarchistic conception, in opposition, for example, to democracy or morality (which are core values today). When its rebellious nature is accepted, design has the potential for providing insight, opening up sweeping possibilities for politically passionate, ardently re-energised social reflection. We can therefore conceive of an anarchist theory of design starting from a renewed appraisal of its practices, and a recognition of its many contributors.

E. O.

Graeber’s proposal of what could be an anarchist ethnography resonates with what I think should be the practice of design. His definition can be transferred and reused as a design methodology. The designer can assume as the central methodology of his/her practice - what Graeber says the anarchist ethnographer could do. The similarities would be in the way [that] anarchist ethnography, according to him [Graeber], relates to common knowledge, in its practical anticipation of (viable) alternatives and in the return of that knowledge to the population, not as a prescription, but as possibilities. Anarchist ethnography, formulated as an “ethical discourse on revolutionary practice,” would require another relationship between the intellectual and the people. This new relationship should be inclusive and non-elitist. It should reject on principle authority and disabling logics, as Ivan Illich said, incubated by professionalisation and specialisation. Graeber conserves in his equation two figures: the radical intellectual and the figure of the people. Julio García Espinosa, author of the manifesto For an Imperfect Cinema, believes in the (Marxist) dissolution of that classist relationship between authors and spectators: “Art is not going to disappear into nothing. It is going to disappear into the whole.”⁷ Imperfect cinema for Espinosa is transitional cinema, something the revolutionary filmmaker must do until the people “stop being objects and become subjects.” Following Julio’s logic, the closest thing to anarchist ethnography would be an imperfect design. We can substitute cinema for design in the first sentence of his manifesto: “Nowadays, perfect design - technically and artistically masterful - is almost always reactionary design.”⁸ In this attempt to establish a critical parallel, the “perfect design” seems to be the one that accepts and responds optimally (masterfully) to the current relations of production, which are essentially nothing other than property relations. Espinosa believes that popular culture “has managed to conserve profoundly cultured characteristics of art. One of the most important of these is the fact that the creators are at the same time the spectators and vice versa. Between those who produce and those who consume, no sharp line of demarcation exists.”⁹ In this sense, I identify more with Augusto Boal’s thinking when he articulates (from theatre) his criticism of the social division of labour.¹⁰ I paraphrase him here: anyone can design, even designers.

E. Q.

Increasingly, design seems to be viewed as a universal activity that transcends specialised sectors, such as the designing of objects and products or industrial modes of production. It extends beyond the historical legacy of modernity, and even beyond the limits of the human. More and more, design is considered an innate technical skill that belongs to every living being and corresponds to her or his capacity to transform the world in order to live in it. But doesn’t this broadening of the definition of design risk diluting the concept completely, nullifying it–and above all, letting individuals, and, in particular, the designer, off the hook?

E. O.

This would imply the utopia of the disappearance of a fragmented individual and culture and why not? The individual’s responsibilities will be other. When Graeber proposes a model of action to the radical intellectual with his example of anarchist ethnography, he is taking for granted that there is no longer a single voice which is authorised to decide what is right. Moreover, his methodology is based precisely on the inclusion of other knowledge and poetics. I do not think that model is utopian, even though Graeber himself considers, in his proposal, one aspect, or ethnographic moment (observe those who are creating viable alternatives), and another utopic one (explore the implications of these alternatives and the return of these ideas as possibilities). In the case of Boal and Espinosa, utopia is in the disappearance of the fragmented individual. For this reason, Espinosa proposes a new imperfect and provisional language of “denunciation as information” for those who fight against the colonial conditions and social inequality that generate an “artistic culture as a fragmented culture of the individual.” Espinosa reiterates the provisional character of his proposal when he says that “imperfect cinema cannot forget that its essential objective is to disappear as a new poetics.”¹¹ Boal, before Graeber, proposes precise tools to propitiate that defragmentation today. Forum Theater, or Legislative Theater, which belong to Boal’s theory of the Theater of the Oppressed, continue to be tools with significant transformative results, not only in Latin America. To answer your question directly, I would ask what design we are referring to. What we call design today seems to extend, as you say, beyond everything. It invades the planet using the most potent vectors: financial, communication. In recent years, we have witnessed the opposite effect–a process of contraction and self-isolation of this world’s unique plan or vision. Other visions offer priorities different than those of capital. The framework Epistemologies of the South¹² and ethical perspectives such as the Ecology of Knowledges¹³ do not exclude anything, not even the Eurocentric vision of design. The Eurocentric vision of design must be considered as such: a Eurocentric vision, but no longer the totalising, imposing vision that we must all follow everywhere. I recognise that it is difficult because the Eurocentric vision of design is precisely a totalising vision. I, for one, will not get nostalgic if design as we have known it disappears. I believe this is something necessary. Graeber suggests to the radical intellec­tual, in his anarchist ethnography proposition, that many others could be doing things, if not better, at least differently and concerning their worlds, viable.

E. Q.

The concept of “viability” seems extremely important. It puts the critical aspect into perspective: it brings together social analysis–which belongs to the social sciences–with the prospect of social change–which belongs to the realm of politics... or design.

E. O.

On the notions of “viability” and “anticipation”, this is something that designers have some experience with (I will speak to it out of my experience of learning about design in Cuba). I am referring to the notion of “vector”. In traditional design education, the object is understood as a vector of form, function and meaning. In this sense the object is a syntactic, pragmatic and semantic vector. The reading of the object as a vector is clearer in the case of the industrial object than in the case of the handcrafted object. The object as vector will be a carrier of cultural values. This understanding has been part of the propaedeutics of design in many schools, from the Bauhaus to today. We were taught to draw spatial networks based on motifs, patterns, and permutations; we learned to establish rhythmic sequences based on organising principles; to prefigure topographies based on generative principles; to build agreements and coordinate metrics. Aren’t these all problems of viability?

The aim of these Vorkurs–with few exceptions–was to introduce us to the complexity of visual language and planning (Rittel).¹⁴ [With this training] they expected us to be useful within the project’s culture. What possibilities do these tools have in the sphere of social relations? Why is it difficult for us to extrapolate these skills and knowledge outside of an object’s production or visual information? For Graeber, what are viable alternatives? To establish vectors to channel knowledge, to link worlds, to build agreements through gen­erosity and respect? Maybe we have some tools, but we need to reuse them in other ways. Perhaps we should hack the vector. In Cuba, for example, standardisation of some objects operates as a vector for repair and reuse solutions. If many have the same artefact, and some people learn to repair it, others learn with them. In recent years, the black market for spare parts has grown. Vernacular producers of these spare parts have added the brand name onto the surface of the object they are servicing. Even if two types of Philips blenders are being sold on the market, the replacement part will include (alongside the brand name) the words “small” or “large,” to distinguish by size one model from the other. This didactic gesture, which has become the norm, facilitates the process of acquiring spare parts. A buyer who is not familiar with his object’s mechanics should only look for the name engraved on the piece. In the second moment of this phenomenon, some producers already start producing parts that fit several models and brands. What this second gesture prioritises is the agreement. Something that we know would not happen in a spontaneous way between producers as Philips and Osterizer because they are giving priority to the competition.

O. P.

During the twentieth century in Western technocratic societies, the institution, the State, the executive class, the experts, with the help of the intellectual avant-garde, decided that a new type of individual was needed, after the architect and the engineer, who would carry out the project, who was literally called the designer. She/he was trained to carry out a project as concerns its form and function. Her/his role was to execute it in compliance with pre-determined specifications, sometimes adding personal aesthetic modifications. What can be said about this definition of design? Unfortunately, this is the way in which the profession is generally viewed. The fact that both design and the designer are in danger of disappearing based on an expansion of the field of design does not change the fact that society still seeks to reduce projects to a process of reductive aesthetics. What we should find disturbing is the total disconnect between the modern project and daily life, particularly if we look at it from the viewpoint of a design school. A few emblematic buildings remain, surrounded by a big material mess. Instead, this is the environment we live in: houses, Wi-Fi, asphalt, garbage dumps, greasy wrappers, chairlifts, shipping containers, ploughed earth, and wild grass sprouting in the crevices. The State–and its proxies–spends its time trying to regulate this way of occupying space, alternating Wild West periods of deregulation and bourgeois periods of normalisation. On the other hand, if indeed design disappears, most probably what will remain will be projection or forecasting. This is surprising, because this can only ever be provisional; from the outset it is understood that such things will never fully come to pass. Design can be neither all-encompassing nor selective. By definition, it is open to all visions of the world, it confirms the limitations of rationality. To return to what Ernesto presents in reference to Boal–namely a description of the fragmented individual–let us apply that to our environments. We live each day surrounded by a disorder of objects, houses, cities and countries, and this irremediably affects our psyches and our bodies. Future projections soar over our heads; dumbfounded we follow their trajectory, knowing full well that they will land somewhere after we are gone. Design is the moment when all visions can be stated in terms of potential trajectories–in the form of sketches, experiments, descriptions, environments... This is what makes it deeply existential.

E. Q.

As designers, how do you express your commitment?

O. P.

Are we speaking about commitment in the sense of clearing a path, or the commitment of an author? As you know, the accepted notion of the author is waning; it is eroding as we speak. Opening up paths for inquiry seems to me to be more to the point. Personally, I try to do this by organising a variety of research spaces. In the mid-1990s, I explored individual strategies through furniture, homelessness, zones of contact as specific design spaces, material/immaterial inventories and their management. In the 2000s, it was Supercampagne, survivalism and, more recently, issues such as design/poverty/fiction. For example, in 2013 I worked on a biography of the automobile as object, and the “Design des Instances” (which has now become an area of research). The “Design of Instances” is one of those openings which, by its very title, rejects public policy design: “the instance” is a shared political space where issues are debated. It is so defined through the use one makes of it (an assembly, a meeting, a political gathering, etc.). The public manner of policy making, however, is determined by the State’s vision of an issue–and correspondingly how an accompanying space is used. In this case, what is important to me is using research to prove that organisations of individuals in collectives, associations, friendships, etc. develop common decision-making tools that can become matrices of larger-scale decision-making methods, up to the reform of the State apparatus, as a non-exclusive mode of collective decision-making. This proposal is in keeping with the profoundly anarchic structure of design, both in its subject matter and in its method, and even in its fundamental thinking. Another example of commitment is the exhibition. This is not a question, as some researchers claim, of opposing the Zeitgeist, or of using exhibitions as citadels celebrating the singularity of creative thought. On the contrary, today’s design exhibition is a documentary space that complements the media library or Internet databases. After having been a place for training individuals throughout history,¹⁵ the exhibition hall has become a place for celebrating technical modernity (MoMA’s exhibitions) or self-celebration (Design miroir du siècle, for example, or the series of solo shows at the Pompidou Centre curated by Marie-Laure Jousset: Starck, Jouin, Arad, etc.). It must now be transformed into a space for updating action-oriented documentation; it should accommodate all types of audiences, for all the political reasons we now know. This involves genealogies of objects, factual approaches, technical culture mapping, meeting spaces within exhibitions, conferences, productions, performances, free self-service documents. We are exploring this subject in research-action, the exhibition as a research-experience. The Biennale Internationale Design de Saint-Étienne 2017 on the evolution of work took on this task:¹⁶ it includ­ed, apart from a variety of documentary exhibitions, a no-man’s land and unofficial occupations, unfinished spaces, squatters, and plenty of self-service documentation and experimentation. It was an anarchist biennial, criticised by some. For me, it was a question of bringing about a possible shift between actual experience, the desanctified object, and, at the same time, the possibility to access a vast body of critical documents about the evolution of work. In this case, design was entirely freed from its conventional framework, serving as a repository for every vision, which it must fully assume. Here, anarchism found concrete expression.

E. O.

I have discussed previously how I went from being a designer to a researcher.¹⁷ I do not pretend to say that the only way for a designer to assume a political commitment is through research. [But] this has been my case. I go back to the beginning of the economic crisis that affected Cuba in the ’90s after the Eastern socialist bloc’s dissolution. As a recent graduate of the Havana School of Design, I sat down every morning to draw, exploring new ways of connecting the chair’s arm to the backrest. In my typological studies, I thought that my furniture’s form should be suppressed by the forces of the context and the complex mestizo culture of Cuba. I wanted to be a radical Cuban designer, and my influence was the radical Italian architects. I did not leave the table for days, I lost weight, food was scarce at home, and I could only draw and read during the day because we had no electricity at night. Within a few months, our life changed radically. One day my mother-in-law came into the space where I was drawing. She had a broken Soviet fan in her hand, placed it on the table, and began to take it apart to find the problem. She was distressed. The high temperatures on the island make fans an extremely important object. Suddenly I understood the uselessness of my daily effort, and above all, I understood that my practice was fractured. On the one hand, I wanted to do radical design, and I drew furniture that was impossible to produce on the island (and that nobody demanded). On the other hand, I participated in the tasks of household survival. But I never saw the latter as a design activity. I understood that day that my mother-in-law was doing radical design. She recognised our needs and the limitations of the context and confronted these demands with objectivity. I joined her and started to repair the object with her. This event reflects not only the learning I acquired during those difficult days, but it was a trigger. I stopped drawing, at least in the manner I had done before, and began to document what was happening in the house, the neighbourhood, then in the country. I turned my research into a tool for dialogue. I elaborated arguments to debate with my colleagues, and I tried to discuss the Cuban production of the crisis. The tendency of some institutions and practitioners of design and architecture has always been to denigrate this production. They have tried for years to push the conversation to a problem of taste. With my thesis, I attempted to make visible the political aspect of these Cuban productive practices and shake the stigma around “necessity.” I wrote and I created exhibitions, often in collectives. I tried to stage the complexity of the phenomenon and provoke debates. To avoid having an external and moralistic gaze, I used expository and discursive methodologies as research tools. Consequently, today I am particularly interested in the notion of “inherent display:” a staging methodology modulated by the internal logic of the object of study. I have recently found an echo of this idea in a text by Manuel de Landa¹⁸ on Deleuze concerning diagrams and form’s genesis. De Landa argues that in opposition to the essentialist thesis of the genesis of form, Deleuze proposes another one where the matter is already pregnant with morphogenetic capacities, in such a way that it is capable of generating a form on its own. In opposition to a conception of “matter as an inert receptacle of external forms” (the traditional exhibition), I am interested in the one where the object of study contaminates, corrupts, informs, and modulates the display. This notion is not far from what I think is the Architecture of necessity.¹⁹ In recent years I have found in Soviet Factography an essential methodology for facilitating collective hermeneutic processes.²⁰ For Sergei Tretyakov, the Soviet Russian writer, poet, photographer, play wrighter and journalist, this practice–which he ended up calling Operativism–proposed a new intellectual role within productive spaces. For Tretyakov, Operativism seemed to integrate (in a dialectic montage) ethnographic recording, journalistic tasks, political agitation, and organisational tasks into a single dispositive. On the one hand, he had the unmediated collective registering, the collaborative creation of a mural-newspaper, or something that operates as such, that while recording the activities of a place, organises the internal dynamics, and a program of collective activities where debate is encouraged. At CyDRe (ESADSE), where I now work, we are trying to use this methodology to situate our research, to encourage collective work, and strengthen the links with Saint-Étienne. And this brings me back to Julio García Espinosa’s thought: “One does not struggle in order to live ‘later on.’ The struggle requires organisation - the organisation of life.”²¹