Rebellion and Responsibility via Van Toorn, Laasen, and Rock

Jan van Toorn

Over the past two days I've read three articles with the common theme of the designer breaking out of her comfortable inertia and answering the call to criticism. It's kind of funny how in my last post I was struggling to gather thoughts around how the outlier becomes mainstream and what is left that can really capture people's attention as a radical approach (truth?) Funny because the next thing I read was "Design and Reflexivity" by Jan van Toorn (1994). 

Van Toorn points out the duality of design's role: as servant of the public interest, and in private service to the client's and the media's needs. Design thus becomes a mediator aimed at reaching consensus, makes compromises, and reduces its power for criticism. A related tension for design is between the need for a renewed vocabulary, and the need to be universally comprehensible.

Describing it as the conflict between "le pain et la liberté," Van Toorn says designers like the idea of making a living in freedom, but this brings the loss of a critical and reflective tradition. The dominant culture creates a symbolism, turns it into "the common instrument of knowledge and communication," and forces the rest of society to define itself within that symbolism.

The simulacrum of institutional culture hides reality. It is useless to replace this simulacrum by creating more in its place--designers need to organize opposition and explose what is behind the message. Van Toorn quotes Felix Guattani, saying we have to "untie the bonds of language and [open] new social, analytical and aesthetic practices." He writes, "The point is no longer to question whether the message is true, but whether it works as an argument."

The reflexive mentality will stimulate a message's audience to deal more actively with reality. "The aim is to arrive at a working method that produces commentaries rather than confirms self-referential fictions."

Van Toorn notes that "all cultures have communicative forms of fiction that refer to their own fictitiousness in resistance to the established social order." Maybe the Dove ads I cited in the last post are an example of this idea. They're forms of fiction themselves, and they highlight the fictitiousness of the advertising system in which they themselves are active participants.

Kalle Laasen's "Design Anarchy" (2006) is a brief statement about artists toppling the establishment, particularly in the ways they interact with mass media, and the ways they produce meaning. He advises that design anarchy is madness, but leads to a deep satisfaction in the value of one's work.

In "The Designer as Author" (1996), Michael Rock gives a brief history of the development, ebb and flow of the concept of authorship. He writes that being unauthored gave early texts a certain authority, as though the information was from God, or from a general truth that was just waiting to be uncovered. Early sacred texts were unauthored, and after the 18th century scientific texts became unauthored. In that same time period, literature became authored, and the author became the focus of public scrutiny, receiving praise and blame for the content of the authored works. Post-structuralism criticized the prestige of the author, ceding responsibility for interpretation of the text to the reader.

Postmodernism brought a decentralization of the text. Rock writes that in this time, "rather than working to incorporate theory into their methods of production, many so-called deconstructivist designers literally illustrated Barthes' image of a reader-based text...scattering fragments of quotations across the surface of their 'authored' posters and book covers." Ellen Lupton called this kind of work "a romantic theory of self-expressionism."

Josef Muller-Brockmann's grid systems relied on what Rock calls "tropes of submission," foregoing personality, and submitting to the "will of the system." By the 1970s, designers were abandoning this kind of rationalist grid.

In 1968, the primacy of the reader resonated when Roland Barthes published "The Death of the Author," as it diminished the author's totalitarian power.

Auteur theory emerged in the 1960s as a way to legitimize film as an art form. It created a central author (the director) for the intrinsically collaborative projects of films. In order to be an auteur, the director had to have 1) technical expertise, 2) a stylistic signature, and 3) consistency of vision and interior meaning (which has to come mainly from its aesthetic.)

Rock points out a major problem with auteur theory (which we, nonetheless, continue to apply to design today): the requisite interior meaning is intangible and unquantifiable, varying from personality to personality.

The designer acting as author suggests transcendence and purity, making design equal with "more traditional privileged forms of authorship." However, Michel Foucault maintains that authorship is not liberating, because it pins all authority on the author, and leaves out any agency for the reader.

Rock recognizes the problem that many working designers see with the notion of authorship--in reality it's pretty hard to come by when the designer's voice so often has to reflect the voice of the client, and when so many projects are collaborative. Designers might want to be authors to take a deeper responsibility for their work, or just to feel greater agency. Rock says that in the end, the goal should be to look beyond the idea of designer as hero and be able to say "What difference does it make who designed it?"