Design in the Borderlands 9780415725187, 9780415725194, 9781315778891

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DESIGN IN THE BORDERLANDS

This book makes a significant contribution to advancing post-geographic understandings of physical and virtual boundaries. It brings together the emergent theory of ‘border thinking’ with innovative thinking on design, and explores the recent discourse on decoloniality and globalism. From a variety of viewpoints, the topics engaged show how design was historically embedded in the structures of colonial imposition, and how it is implicated in more contemporary settings in the extension of ‘epistemological colonialism’. The chapters draw on perspectives from diverse geo-cultural and theoretical positions including architecture, design theory and history, sociology, critical theory and cultural studies. The authors are leading and emergent figures in their fields of study and practice, and the geographic scope of the chapters ranges across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, South America, Asia and the Pacific. In recognition of the complexity of challenges that are now determining the future security of humanity, Design in the Borderlands aims to contribute to ‘thinking futures’ by adding to the increasingly significant debate between design, in the context of the history of Western modernity, and decolonial thought. Eleni Kalantidou is a design psychologist, researcher and educator. She is a Lecturer in the Design Futures Master and Undergraduate Program at Griffith University, Australia. Eleni has a research background in psycho-sociology of space. She is the author of a number of articles and is currently working on a research publication on design psychology. Tony Fry is a design theorist and an award-winning designer, writer and educator. He works in Australia and internationally. He established the Master of Design Futures Program and the undergraduate Design Futures Program at Griffith University, Australia. Tony is the author of ten books. His current writing project is on the future of the city.

‘In this trans-disciplinary, epistemically disobedient collection an international group of border thinkers reveals the coloniality of design as an overall perceptive mechanism grounded in Eurocentrism and hiding the global imperial claims. They radically decolonize design, opening up its creative dimensions as a tool of ontological transformation of the world and ourselves pointing toward transmodern multiple futures.’ Madina Tlostanova, Full Professor, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration ‘Design in the Borderlands is a brave effort at enriching the geographies of design. Introducing border thinking to design studies, this collection of essays demonstrates the profound social and political significance of design along and across major issues like modernity, coloniality, sustainability, power and identity in and from a series of loci situated in the creases and at the edges of society, both locally and globally.’ Kjetil Fallan, Professor, University of Oslo

DESIGN IN THE BORDERLANDS

Edited by Eleni Kalantidou and Tony Fry

ix ix ix ix ix

Routledge Taylor & Francis Croup

LONDON AND NEW YORK

E0DHiEKElil

from Routledae

First published 2014 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2014 selection and editorial material, Eleni Kalantidou and Tony Fry; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Eleni Kalantidou and Tony Fry to be identified as authors of the editorial material, and of the individual authors as authors of their contributions, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Design in the borderlands / edited by Eleni Kalantidou and Tony Fry. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Design--Social aspects. 2. Postcolonialism. I. Kalantidou, Eleni, editor of compilation. II. Fry, Tony, editor of compilation. III. Fry, Tony, author. Design in the borderlands. NK1505.D4715 2014 720.1’03--dc23 2013043315 ISBN: 978-0-415-72518-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-415-72519-4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-77889-1 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by GreenGate Publishing Services, Tonbridge, Kent

CONTENTS

Notes on contributors Acknowledgements Design in the borderlands: an introduction Tony Fry and Eleni Kalantidou

vii ix 1

1 China vs China: conflict and translation Tony Fry

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2 Back to the Third World: the Greek experience Eleni Kalantidou

37

3 Modernity and design in the Arab world: professional identity and social responsibility Samer Akkach 4 Timor-Leste: unlearning in order to be Tony Fry 5 Urban design for the Global South: ontological design in practice Paul James 6 Africa: designing as existence Helder Pereira and Coral Gillett

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76

91

109

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7 Counter-mapping and globalism Peter Alec Hall

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8 A note from Brazil: looking at the production of design knowledge in Brazil Maria Cecilia Loschiavo dos Santos

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9 Looking from the other side of the street: youth, participation and the arts in the edgelands of urban Manchester Janet Batsleer and Jenny Hughes

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10 An exchange: questions from Tony Fry and Eleni Kalantidou and answers from Walter Mignolo Tony Fry and Eleni Kalantidou

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Index

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CONTRIBUTORS

Samer Akkach is the Director of the Centre of Asian and Middle Eastern Architecture, University of Adelaide (Australia), where he also teaches. He is an internationally acclaimed researcher and much-published writer on pre-modern and modern Middle Eastern architecture and philosophy. Janet Batsleer works as Principal Lecturer in Youth and Community Work at

Manchester Metropolitan University (UK). She has a particular interest in the city street as a space of democratic informal education and in what enables education otherwise than for neoliberal capitalism. Tony Fry is the Head of Design Futures Program, Queensland College of Art,

Griffith University, Brisbane (Australia). Tony is an educator and internationally established author. He has published ten books and has numerous essays in collections. Tony has worked on ‘Design and Development’ projects globally and is currently directing a major ‘Indigenous Creative Industry’ project in Timor-Leste. Peter Alec Hall is a Design Writer, Senior Lecturer and Design Department Head at Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, Brisbane (Australia). Before moving to Brisbane, he was Senior Lecturer in design at the University of Texas at Austin. Peter is also the co-editor (with Jan Abrams) of the book Else/Where: Mapping – New Cartographies of Networks and Territories. Jenny Hughes is a Senior Lecturer in Drama at the University of Manchester

(UK). Her research explores the relationship between theatre, performance and states of emergency and, at the time of writing, focuses on theatrical representations of and engagements with economic precarity.

viii Contributors

Paul James is the Director of the UN Global Compact Cities Programme, and the

Global Cities Institute, RMIT, Melbourne (Australia). He is author or editor of 25 books including, most importantly, Globalism, Nationalism, Tribalism. His current work contributes to the sustainability of many cities around the world from Porto Alegre to Berlin. Eleni Kalantidou is a Design Psychologist and Lecturer of Design Theory at the

Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, Brisbane (Australia). Her research on Design Psychology is strongly connected to re-directing design thinking and practice and her publications are all thematically relevant to new models of community and ways of living based on unsettlement and sustainment. Maria Cecilia Loschiavo dos Santos is a Philosopher and Professor of Design

at the School of Architecture and Urbanism, University of São Paulo (Brazil). She is also a scholar of the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq). She conducts research on design and society, looking at design and urban poverty. Walter D. Mignolo is a Semiotician (École des Hautes Études) and Professor at Duke University, NC (USA), who has published extensively on semiotics and literary theory, and works on different aspects of the modern and colonial world by exploring concepts such as global coloniality, the geopolitics of knowledge, transmodernity, border thinking and pluriversality. Helder Pereira and Coral Gillett lead Atelier Mulemba, an architectural design studio based in Luanda (Angola), which has a focus on innovative design and research projects that draw from and respond to the Angolan context. Both are graduates of the Master of Design Futures, Queensland College of Art, Griffith University.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to express our gratitude to all the contributors. They responded to our invitation with interest and energy and their cooperation over the development of this project was truly appreciated. We would also like to thank Alice Aldous, Senior Editorial Assistant at Routledge for her guidance and support. Lastly, a profound thank you is in order to Rebecca Barnett, who willingly and untiringly fulfilled our need for a detailed reading of the manuscript, and Andrew Temperly, who provided his time and skills to help us finalise it.

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DESIGN IN THE BORDERLANDS An introduction Tony Fry and Eleni Kalantidou

Historically the issue of the relations between geography, politics and cultures is as old as the differences within, and between, civilisations themselves. But in our age the geopolitical tensions, nature of the global economy, speed of technological change and the large numbers of people moving between nations are dramatically changing the picture and character of intercultural dynamics. More specifically, inflammatory rhetoric and the acting out of old conflicts within new contexts add to an already complex situation. In light of this, there is a need to more adequately understand that the geopolitics of inter-cultural difference is now taking on a new hue. Moreover, new imperatives are arriving, as often unresolved problems of the past meet emergent ones of the present, with determinate consequences for our collective future. That raises serious questions about the form of the future; rising to the challenges that are now unfolding, and gaining the understanding that meeting them, needs questioning so much that goes unquestioned. Central to this process of inquiry is asking what form the future should take, recognising that it will be plural, and will provide the means to sustain the web of life in which we are woven. Likewise, attempts to differentiate between what can and cannot be changed are vital to investigate, as are the means of change. Important among them is the agency of design, not as a grand vision of a global project or as a preoccupation with the fetishisation of the form of structure, product or images; rather, framed by the imperatives of our age, design has to be recognised as the decision and direction embodied in all things humans deliberately bring into being, this as they relationally constitute the made environments of our existence. The material forms of design, the designed, are thus means not ends; design is never complete for it never ceases to have consequences, large or small. In many varied ways the content of the essays in this collection will concretise the conceptual overview of the design just outlined, as it historically infuses the everyday life and instability wrought by colonialism upon the colonised people of

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the world and, in the contemporary era, as its forms morph into globalism. Design resides in the maelstrom that is ‘now’. In this setting it either serves or counters the forces of the moment (as again the chapters will show). So said, it is worth providing a certain reading of this moment as the geopolitics of inter-cultural difference has been affected by the heritage and violence of globalisation and as other ways of thinking and being have been retained or created. It is in this context that our consideration of ‘border thinking’ will arrive. To make a view of the moment clear we will use Samuel Huntington’s exposition of the ‘clash of civilisations’ (first voiced in a lecture in 1992, presented in an article in the journal Foreign Affairs in 1993, and then developed into a book published in 1995) as a point of entry. What Samuel Huntington did was to reduce the inter-cultural complexity of contemporary societies to binary global oppositions between his designations of civilisations. The popularised view of such thinking promoted, effectively layered onto largely media-created perceptions of ‘the war on terror’, as it was initially ‘waged’ on al-Qaida through the NATO-supported USA invasion of Afghanistan (an action taken a month after the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York, on 11 September 2001). Fuelled again by the popular media, as subsequent events in the Middle East have been reported, and in so doing mirroring the problematic rhetoric of Samuel Huntington’s binary, there is now a widespread view that ‘the West’ is locked into an epochal clash with Islam. As Karl Marx pointed out in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, history repeats itself ‘the first time as tragedy, the second as farce’ (Marx 2008, p. 15). Repetition now is of a third order: first there were the Crusades, then came the conflict with the Ottoman Empire and now there is a less clearly defined opposition denoted by the ‘war on terror’ against al-Qaida, the Taliban and radical Jihadists at ‘the sharp end’. What at this moment in time arrives is history as a farcical tragedy. Conflict begets dispersed conflict, misunderstanding begets increased misunderstanding and tragedy begets more tragic tragedy. One of the results of this miasma is a reinforcement of an already deeply embedded Eurocentric worldview and a hardening of anti-Western sentiments among many peaceful Muslims. Faced with this situation, and its indivisible placement in the larger frame of the history and futural consequences of Western colonialism, there is an increasing need for other ways of thinking, other discourses, spaces, modes of enunciation and ways of acting. These all have to be, and are starting to be, created. But for this to happen it is essential that intellectual borders are crossed and disciplinary hierarchies are dismembered. It is the ambition of the essays in this collection to contribute to this end.

Globality, Eurocentrism, colonialism, epistemology What is becoming increasingly clear from critiques that have been developing over the past few years is that all post-colonialism represented was a withdrawal of the discernable apparatus of colonial power. It did not mean an end of colonialism. Rather its consequences have continued by two mechanisms, both of which were

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grounded in Western modernity and extended the reach of Eurocentric power in certain ways while reducing its immediate visibility. One of these was the fake reformism and pseudo-humanitarianism of ‘Globalisation’; the other was the agency of knowledge, as inscribed into the functionality of the everyday habitus, and the subjects that occupy it, as characterised by the concept of ‘epistemological colonialism’. Globalisation, in essence, extends the universalising system of exchange that underpins hegemonic capitalism. As such it shares the same totalising ambition of modernity, but without the idealism. No matter what claims are made the intent is simply ‘big capitalism’. It is literally a monstrous project of total economic colonisation. This means it negates local economic knowledge, practices and values. But at the same time it appropriates anything and everything deemed to be able to be revalorised within the remit of its own economic regime. Nothing that can be exchanged exists beyond the reach of the means of commodification. An economic metabolic machine is introduced to facilitate the sating of this hunger for growth. Anything of economic value has its value enhanced, a local economic infrastructure (from financial systems to supply chains) is put in place; the desires for, and values of, global commodity culture arrive as the means to gain entry into modernised reality. Indivisibly and ineludibly the base values of this desired culture were, and are, transported into ontologically designing environments (government departments, educational institutions, businesses) from which a particular modern society, and its subjects, classes, civil structures and ways of life, were to become projected. Successively, this projection of commodity culture, as work and its rewards, has been deeply implicated in the rapid urbanisation of a huge numbers of cities in non-Western nations. And the impetus this process created has generated a huge human urban overspill that has lead to the ‘self-building’ of informal settlement on an enormous scale. In this context, claims made on the advances brought by globalisation are either wrong or contestable. Less debatable is what it destroys, which is essentially the counter-developmental potentiality of what is already present in the local (be they creative and craft practices, knowledge, farming and horticultural skills). With care and selectivity, what the development of the local can do is to provide a counter direction and discourse to the extension of unsustainability that globalisation always brings. Rather than seeing this as a contest between the old and new, it begs to be viewed as the global new versus the local new within the setting of the global. Such thinking fully acknowledges that, in the face of the constant forward march of the unsustainable, all of humanity has to have its life conditions improved. The implication of these remarks is that ‘aid’ is an exchange, a mutual learning and twoway traffic. What this means is that an enhancement of the material conditions of some is vital (the development of a counter development) enabled by a diminishment of excess of others (a development to counter development). Poverty and excess are both defuturing faces of unsustainability that the illogicality of ‘capital logic’ is unable to comprehend, for this ‘logic’ was constituted

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prior to the recognition that everything that the extant economy creates, rests upon destruction. This has only become apparent to those who care to look. What can be seen is that the scale of the global population and the level of economic growth reached a point when the rate of destruction started to exceed resource creation and renewal (Thomas Malthus is proving to be more right than wrong). Put another way, all bio-cybernetic systems have a capacity to absorb and recover from damage (read as a metaphor for pre-industrial society) but once damage goes beyond a certain point they result in complete breakdown (read as a metaphor for the unsustainable nature of industrial and post-industrial society). Following on: what the vast literature on globalisation lacks is precisely thinking about this reversal, which, rather than connoting a return to the idealism of ‘small is beautiful’ on a global scale, actually asserts ‘there is no future (for “us”) without sustainment’. Thus, for globalisation read globalised defuturing, which is to say that once the rate of destruction exceeds the rate of renewal our (species) time is taken away, reduced. Once this is understood the very nature of the debate on ‘our’ mode of earthly habitation needs to change. Epistemological colonialism can be understood as a certain kind of viral afterlife of a progenitor; it goes on doing the job of colonisation long after the material trappings of its parental host have departed. As such it continues to extend key features of the values, mode of thought and worldview constituted as the colonised mind. Even after the global structures of a Eurocentric world order had fallen, even after the geopolitical power of former Western colonial power has dissolved, the colonisation of mind continued to be extended, least evident in the endless erasure of local and indigenous sensibilities and knowledge. This is a process, a hollowing out of culture that happens over time and across generations. To speak of it is so often to invite indignation. Certainly globalisation presents a certain kind of culture, but it is culture as image, as an empty shell and evacuated memory. At the same time it is important to acknowledge that such a fractured form of culture is created, exists and becomes ‘occupied subjectivities’. What has been, and will be made clear in various ways by many of the chapters, is that the need for decoloniality continues; it is an unfinished business, and in a world of dispersed communities, that is no longer identifiable in easily designated geographic space.

Turning to design Moving from the historical to the futural provides the opening into which design can arrive and can be seen to be a determinate force of global change. This is providing that design itself is remade. Key to this remaking is breaking from the impositional worldly enframing based on an assemblage of the modern (the unification of all and everything designed by the materiality of modern ideology), followed by a turning to a mode of ontological design that is able to redirect, repair and remake the often aesthetically concealed damage of modernity.

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An important key and celebrated mantra of design practice is that it is a ‘problem-solving activity’, whereas in so many ways the designed has been problem-creating. One of the main reasons for this is that designers mostly commence their task under the direction of a client brief in which the major design decisions have already been made. Thereafter, designers mostly solve ‘how to’ second-order problems, to realise and deliver the client’s requirement. In doing this, it so often creates a problem that the client’s intent never recognised, or even knew existed. The counter-practice now becomes ‘design as a problem-defining activity’. This obviously implies another way of thinking in which an awareness of Eurocentrism, border thinking, structures of epistemological colonisation and an understanding of defuturing can arrive to significantly contribute to the revelation of the actual fundamental problems to be solved. Other ways of thinking design bring with them another mode of reading the designed. To take an obvious and pertinent example: design was deeply embedded in the structures of colonial imposition. The colonial city, for example, was not merely an expressive form of colonial power but equally it was an operational system of order, as was introduced agriculture and the industrialised workplace. The ordering of space and time in turn were elemental to the designing of new (colonised) ontologies predicated upon (by degree) the erasure of those that were extant. This process continues but, as indicated, it has shifted from mechanisms of overt performative imposition to the devises of desire delivered by and for commodity culture, together with an induction into the functional structures of the operation of a globalised economy, which, as said, is being made possible by ‘capital logic’, a practice to which ‘epistemological colonialism’ continues to extend via it arriving for ‘the subject’ as ‘the way the world works’. Now the complexity of colonisation in the present conjuncture has become a contextually variable evident in permutations of knowledge, design and technology wherein the distinction between the coloniser and the colonised blurs and often shifts from subject to system. Consequentially, design forms and practices create conditions of negation in both their progressive luminescence (the worlds they illuminate) and in the darkness of their regressive otherness (the worlds they destroy). Against the backdrop of these concerns, the book explores the continued pervasiveness of, and the interstices and convergences between, Eurocentrism, the rise of the importance of border thinking, the power of design and agency of knowledge. Eurocentrism is not merely a perceptual bias but a directive mode of consciousness determining a worldview and a myriad of practices directed at not just how the world is viewed but equally how it is understood and shaped by design, the idea of the modern of course folded into this understanding and shaping. Another viewpoint on the relation between design, theory, practice and Eurocentrism requires acknowledgement. One can characterise this relation between Eurocentrism and design as the movement to, from and between (i) the globalisation of Eurocentric power by design; and (ii) the design of globalisation by the Eurocentric mind. At the intersection of this, dynamic forms of recolonisation are created, recreated and transmogrified. Some of these forms become dis-spaced

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from located space and re-placed in and by an ‘ecology of mind and image’. But equally, again as more than one essay will show, the image of the modern can and does shatter. Regress arrives in the abyss this shattering creates. Without reduction to simple binaries, each chapter in some way deals with design’s double-dealing of objectified Eurocentrism and the ‘other’ negated. In so doing the aim is to raise the level of debate, to recognise contra-Western understandings of design and to meet and engage the growing fragmentation of Western design theory and knowledge. The plural nature of design cannot any longer be gathered and contained within any homogenising frame notwithstanding for a ‘world history of design’ to be ‘manufactured’ within design history.

The nature of border thinking In his interview in this volume, Walter Mignolo explains that: Briefly, border thinking requires a shift in the geography of reasoning, a geopolitical conception of knowing, understanding and believing, a delinking from the assumption of modern and postmodern epistemology, hermeneutics and sensibility. (p. 174) Taking this statement as a backdrop of the book, what we have set out to do is to illustrate approaches to presenting a shift in ‘a geography of reasoning’. As Walter Mignolo knows well, how and what we think are indivisible from where we think. The ‘where’ is always a locus of ontological design in two respects: it is always a particular node of an ecology of mind, which now is always a synthesis of local encounter and the global information; and likewise the ‘where’ is also a moving point. Going beyond the old adage that ‘travel broadens the mind’ it actually, to a greater or lesser degree, transforms it. Designing, and being ontologically designed by the experience of ‘being in place(s)’ over time, is always a condition of political emersion. The world of human fabrication that constitutes topos is always political, in that the making of a world is always for, and thus serves, someone. The creation and occupation of space by design cannot but be ideological and known in relation to other places, hence knowing where you are designing, or are going to design, is always geopolitical. Border thinking arrives in the space of being and as such is intrinsically deconstructive in so far as it is predicated upon the disclosure of the foundation of placement rendered sensible by epistemological enactment and interpretative action. It brings us to confront the knowing of the ground of what we know and how such knowing frames what we see, hear and understand in the spaces of our being and becoming. By implication, border thinking breaks out of disciplinary boundaries; it crosses borders, is nomadic, as such it is: (a) a thinking along, within and about borders rather than a thinking of them. It is the existential register of Niklas Luhmann’s problematic of observation always being from the inside and always demanding to be observed (Luhmann 1989). And at the same time, it

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is: (b) equally an automatic refusal of containment, ownership and institution. This means it cannot be fixed and ‘held in place’, rather it is an individual and collective movement between one mode of being, world and thinking, wherein imminence rather than indeterminacy rules. While embracing the plural (worlds) it does not affirm pluralism, which in the last instance is always exclusive and able to be mono-culturally configured. The book registers and aspires to prompt a new conversation that works towards new knowledge. Part of this aspiration is breaking design out of its zone of disciplinary containment so it may enter into other realms of thought and practice that reciprocate the same liberatory ambition evidenced by dialogue with it. Such conversations are not to be taken as purely academic but are directed towards a praxis. This is to say that better-informed, better-theorised designing should not be just the remit of those of us designated as ‘designers’ but should be acknowledged to be a conscious transformative action open to being deployed by anyone (everyone designs, of course, but not necessarily knowing that this is what they are doing, or that to design knowingly is to recognise its directional consequences, a comment that does not imply that all designers act having this knowledge). The book’s politics are also clearly directed towards the imperative of decoloniality. In so doing it strives to contribute to processes of unlearning the already learnt, and the advancing of a new learning that recognises that epistemological colonisation is indiscriminate, omnipresent and ever-mutating in form and content. Certainly the contained and dispersed contemporary colonised ‘masses’ of the underside of modernity are an acknowledged historically identifiable recipient constituency. But then there is also a futural globalised audience being constituted by emergent, and less geopolitically distinct, modalities of the colonisation of mind. The gap between actual readers and the actual recipient constituencies touched by epistemological colonisation in some form, past and present, is enormous. This ‘return’ was partly characterised by Michel Foucault in the mid-1970s as the now-celebrated ‘boomerang effect’. It should never be forgotten that, while colonisation, with its techniques and its political and juridical weapons, obviously transported European models to other continents, it also had a considerable boomerang effect on the mechanisms of power in the West, and on the apparatuses, institutions and techniques of power. A whole series of colonial models was brought back to the West, and the result was that the West could practise something resembling colonisation, or an internal colonialism, on itself (Foucault 2003, p. 103). Circumstances have changed somewhat since Foucault penned those words. More than just ‘colonial models’ have returned from whence they came. Now there is a continuous flow of people, not least as the late colonial wars of the twenty-first century expel their refugees to wherever. The more extreme of military theorists are now claiming this is a new kind of invasion that can be as dangerous as invasion by a state army. This kind of thinking has been named as ‘the weaponisation of immigration’ by the Washington DC-based Centre for Immigration Studies (Graham 2011, p. 103).

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In geopolitical terms, the form, function and sense of borders are changing; they are bleeding. Stephen Graham presents a clear view of this. In our time, nationstates are moving away from their role as guarantors of a community of citizens within a territorial unit, charged with policing links between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’. Instead, these states are becoming internationally organised systems geared towards trying to separate people, and circulation demands risky or malign separation from those deemed risk-free or worthy of protection (Graham 2011, p. 89). The relation between the chapters is not tightly drawn. But they do resonate with each other and often link and support each other. The overall argument of the book is, of course, the collective voice of the chapters. The potential to be able to do this is that all the authors of the publication have histories, in various configurations, emerging or established relations, of working together. But much more than this, they all occupy the ontological space, the borderland, from which what they write emanates. In detail, the focus of Chapter 1, ‘China vs China: conflict and translation’, in an extended sense is translation, which is not only deeply implicated in the practices of globalisation and more particularly epistemological colonisation, but is integral to language and socio-cultural exchange itself as subjects move between worlds and as borders are occupied, navigated and crossed. Tony Fry has chosen China to demonstrate its transitional state by exploring the hidden dimension of unknown knowledge from the nation’s ancient past that has been documented (not least by the ‘Needham project’), together with substantial concealed histories of the modern age. In the context of the history of modernity, the chapter first looks at the relation between the ancient and the modern and then explores the design(ing) implications of a ‘geography of knowledge’ – this formed, at very different moments, between the export of knowledge from China and its import from Europe. The chapter concludes with various statements regarding the complexity of the translational fabric of China and points out ‘the value of commencing situated opening of “border thinking” of China that brings design into the picture’ (p. 33) as a means of understanding the importance of ontological transformation via design. On the same note, Chapter 2, ‘Back to the Third World: the Greek experience’, exhibits the misapprehended nature of an overexposed nation, Greece, through a historical and sociological analysis of the design of its modern construct and the destruction of its pre-modern ways via the colonisation of the ‘bricolaged’ Greek mind by Eurocentric thought. Eleni Kalantidou goes on to present how ‘The Cradle of Civilisation’ willingly negated its Eastern heritage as to become its ‘superior self’, and how it never managed to balance between its Occidental and Oriental ends, staying till the present moment in limbo, in a state of memory loss concurrent with an inability to imagine a custom-made future. The chapter closes by bringing to the fore the question of how to think about design from an economy and culture in flux, how to reverse the principles linked to Eurocentrism by attempting the construction of new rules and how to make a periphery embrace its borderness. Moving further East, Samer Akkach’s chapter ‘Modernity and design in the Arab world: professional identity and social responsibility’ on Arabic design,

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negotiates the design thinking and practices in the Arabic-speaking world and the significant changes it underwent in the nineteenth century. In doing so, he explores the origins of the modern Arabic term tasmim, which is universally used today for ‘design’, by presenting the considerable difficulties that pre-modern design thinking is bounded to, as before modernity there was no recognisable word for ‘design’, nor was there a ground for its self-referential modern theories. In brief, Chapter 3 attempts to trace the changes in design thinking and practices, which took place in the Arabic-speaking world through exposure to the ideas of European Enlightenment, in order to investigate the parameters of Arab design thinking and practices from within and without the Eurocentric model. Another geographic area with a tormented design past and present, at a nexus between the Indian and Pacific Oceans, is Timor-Leste, marked by a history of colonial conflict that only ended just over a decade ago. Currently it is recovering its damaged indigenous culture and designing a future in part with it. In his chapter ‘Timor-Leste: unlearning in order to be’, Tony Fry identifies and deciphers the phases of colonisation that Timor-Leste had to go through from 1509 with the arrival of the Portuguese till the present day, and the cultural transformation this entailed. He also discusses the idea and the realisation of a ‘creative industry’ that started happening in 2009, and its potential to ontologically define a nation where every generation still speaks a different language as an outcome of the various influences its people had to endure. This part of the world, Timor-Leste and especially Dili, is also explored in Paul James’ chapter ‘Urban design for the Global South: ontological design in practice’, where the author talks about the necessity of undertaking serious consideration of ‘why’ designing for creative ontological friction entails and not only the ‘how’. In order to exhibit his view on ontological design the author uses examples coming respectively from Port Moresby (Papua New Guinea), Dili (Timor-Leste) and Johannesburg (South Africa), which reveal the disclosed opportunities in borderlands to be ontologically re-designed and restated. At the end of Chapter 5, Paul James’ definition of ontological design ‘as working explicitly in terms of what it has meant and still means to be human with all our frailties and limitations’ (p. 93) is explained through his Manifesto for Urban Development, where he provides a guide for ontological design reflection and borderland change. Africa continues to be part of the borderland discourse in Chapter 6, ‘Africa: designing as existence’, not as a homogenised geographical entity but as a continent that is not culturally, politically and economically unified, across or within national boundaries. Thus, to talk about African design is immediately problematic. Subsequently how should design from Africa be viewed and engaged? What are the relations between the ancient and the modern, the indigenous and the imported, the crafted and the manufactured, the formal and informal? So as to answer those questions, Helder Pereira and Coral Gillett demonstrate the role of design as the enabler and executor of the colonial project by focusing on the case of Angola and the appropriation of pre-modern, modern and meta-modern means of communicating design in the same framework. They end by expressing the

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belief that Angolan design is on its way to be identified as a decolonial praxis, as a transformative ontological power able to detag Angola from its imposed inferiority. Very relevant to Africa, a continent cartographically reconfigured by coloniality, is Chapter 7, ‘Counter-mapping and globalism’, by Peter Hall, in which the author exposes how the West’s view of the world became a physical and cognitive mapping with its own imperialist, designing agency. The chapter also includes a detailed presentation of mapping as a tool of multifaceted manipulation and mass direction, and explores its contemporary empowerment through the global digitalisation and the fairy tale of ‘real-time’ image. The chapter’s epilogue emphasises the need for greater criticality regarding the uninvestigated parameters of mapping and provides a positive message by stating how counter cartographies, appropriated military technologies and a rethinking of everyday orientation, perception of space and self-orientation have helped germinate alternative models of envisioning place and power relations. Continuing the discussion on manipulating the public perception of space through image, Maria Cecilia Loschiavo dos Santos, the author of Chapter 8, ‘A note from Brazil: looking at the production of design knowledge in Brazil’, reintroduces homelessness, by distancing it from the saturated visual communication of despair and helplessness and by placing it in a context that nourishes ontological design through the innovative use of skills, the untouched by coloniality imagination, and the discovery of new affordances in objects, culture, life. The author, who has extensively worked with people living on the margins, draws from her personal experience to uncover their resourcefulness and their contribution to sustainment. Additionally by presenting students’ work in that area, she underlines the importance of promoting similar research interests and integrating them in the academic curriculum. Working with people on the outside, on the urban and societal edge, is an essential element of Janet Batsleer and Jenny Hughes’ research orientation too, who contribute to this book with Chapter 9, ‘Looking from the other side of the street: youth, participation and the arts in the edgelands of urban Manchester’. And even though the United Kingdom can hardly be described as a borderland, this chapter portrays the marginalisation of a certain community in Manchester: young men engaged in sex work in Manchester’s Gay Village. The authors mostly use information from the Men’s Room, a project that has put its efforts into giving back to an outcast population a dignified presence in the city, a voice and a semi-permanent ‘home’, with the input of artists, social care workers and support staff, in order to demonstrate a design thinking that seizes the prospects of being on the border. Finally, Chapter 10 outlines what has been previously argued in all chapters regarding design in the borderlands in a discussion shaped through questions and answers posed by the editors to Walter Mignolo on the imposition of being the one and the ‘other’; the transformative nature of coloniality and its multi-layered reinvention in space and time; the notion of Grossraum in the era of mega-regions; and the imminent death of great nations. Moreover, this contribution provides Walter Mignolo’s insights on the re-invention of South America’s countries by

Design in the borderlands: an introduction 11

unravelling Argentina’s socio-political condition of existence, his take on the new ‘imperialism’ via the culture of surveillance and closes with a statement regarding the potentiality of humanity to ontologically un-design itself in order to re-design its present and create the possibility of a future. In conclusion, we would declare that the ambition of this collection of essays is to extend debate on design beyond the discipline and, as such, it can be read as an invitation. Likewise, it is to demonstrate that design is too important to be held captive by a dominantly instrumental discipline. In the spirit of these remarks, we look forward to whatever conversation ensues.

References Foucault, M. 2003, ‘Society Must Be Defended’ lecture at the College of France, 1975–76, trans. D. Macy, eds M. Bertani and A. Fontana, Picador, New York. Graham, S. 2011, Cities Under Siege, Verso, London. Luhmann, N. 1989, Ecological Communication, Polity Press, Cambridge. Marx, K. 2008, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Wildside Press LLC, Rockville, MD.

1 CHINA VS CHINA Conflict and translation Tony Fry

As is now widely recognised, it is not actually possible to understand the contemporary world, and its future, without understanding the rise to power and complexity of China, this in both historical and contemporary terms. Yet few Western media representations of China’s culture, politics, economy and military ambitions get anywhere near doing this. Notwithstanding the manner of its characterisation, there can be no assumption that China is a legible and coherent whole. In many respects the entire history of China has been about trying to hold the fragments that make up the nation. This continuing situation in fact frames many of the policies and practices of the current political regime. The longstanding contradictions, tensions and perspectives that dominantly constitute the Eurocentric view simply ignore the contemporary significance of China’s ancient past and the extent to which the West has been implicated in its modern history. While this history remains largely invisible to most people in the West, not least many politicians, it has played, and still plays, an enormously important part in directing the nation, its development, foreign policy and action on the world stage. Unless efforts are made to acknowledge this situation, and then to better understand it, establishing appropriate and futurally viable relations with China will ever remain problematic. Within this context, the nation presents a very large challenge of cultural translation. In exposing the nature of this challenge we will show that the process of translation has been a key factor in underpinning many of the ‘designing forces’ that have made China the nation it now is. Colonial violence, design and technology, the image of the modern, and an extensive collection of translated written works, all coalesced within the process of China’s transcendence of colonisation. One cannot get a sense of the relation between China and decoloniality without gaining some understanding of the content and dynamics of this process and the viewing it discloses.

China vs China: conflict and translation 13

More specifically, the design forces that transformed much of the material and immaterial worlds of life in China, forces that became evident in new industries, ways of working, institutions, built structure, products and so on, not only created a new environment but also a new social subject. Thus, this new designed world was equally a designing world, including modes of being in the contradictions of the emergent world. Yet, for scores of millions of poor rural village people, little changed, and, notwithstanding a huge migration to cities, still has not. Our point of entry is into China’s colonial history of the mid-nineteenth century. This century was a traumatic epoch of transition, one in which there was a rupture from the past and the creation of a condition of failure out of which modern China was created. In ways to be made clear, contestation was omnipresent during this period. It was especially seen as between: the past and the future; philosophical ideologies of the Occident and the Orient; tradition and the modern; and the alignment with Western and Chinese values. Contestation did not only occur across these diverse domains but equally was manifested on multiple levels within them. In particular, China between 1850 and 1900 was in a state of turmoil between what it was and what it was to become. In this setting, the problems of the nascent border thinking, the thinking of betweenness, will be broached and explored through the work of two translators, John Fryer and Yan Fu. But before it is possible to do this, a brief account of the period needs to be given, not least because most readers will be unfamiliar with the events that shaped these men’s lives, world and respective projects. Crucially, the conflicts of the times and responses to them absolutely determined both these men’s lives and the fate of the nation.

On and of history and translation It is doubtful if it is possible to approach and view China historically in any condition of comfort from any available planetary position. Notwithstanding the current status and economic power of China, for most people in the West, its history exists as a few parodied events, a view from movies, and the televisual picture of the dramas of its post-communist era: it thus appears on the surface of a Eurocentric screen so characterised. But in contrast, for many Asian nations, China was seen as a shadow cast over their future, as an enemy to be feared, despised or engaged. It follows that the global and political positions from which histories of China are written are all problematic: a situation amplified by history itself being a problem. Both these observations converge when one recognises that history is always written from a particular point of view for a particular end. One can also report more generally, and without exaggeration, that the discipline of history is in turmoil.1 In addition to these remarks it is important to note that the nature and status of history in China itself is even harder to comprehend: there are few nations where a ‘war on the past’ has been waged more viciously. Both in the mid-nineteenth century, and more comprehensively under Mao Zedong’s ‘Cultural Revolution’ of the 1960s, the past was put under erasure as it was deemed to obstruct a path

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to the future. As a result there was a widespread and long-term forgetting of the attainments of the nation’s distant and ancient past. So said, what follows acknowledges the level of mediation by available accounts as they traverse a wide range of translated works of Chinese historical literature, the work of Western sinologists and informed commentators. Although acknowledging that the agency of translated texts will be given a good deal of attention, it is equally important to note that the very essence and historical significance of translation as transformation is also being recognised. The translated is effectively a transposition of a hermeneutic process of the text from one culture to another. The aim of the acquisition of a common understanding can thus only be partly realised linguistically. From remarks made, it should be realised that understanding also requires both history and translation (within and not just between languages) to be treated with caution. The other decisive factor is of course recognising the transformative interpretive power of cultural difference. What follows makes no claim to transcend the problems evoked by these caveats; rather it will aim to expose them.

The colonial matrix of modern China Three moments of the arrival of (forms of) the West in China are to be registered (however, the debate over whether or not Marco Polo ‘discovered’ China will be avoided). (Wood 1995, p. 14) The first moment was the arrival of Jesuit missionaries in the sixteenth century. With them came Western thought, religion and science, and from them the export to whence they came of views on Chinese history, culture and knowledge. Moment two was the arrival and limited incursion of merchants during the eighteenth century. By the end of the century these merchants were increasingly complaining to their governments about high customs duties and efforts to curb the import of opium that had been introduced as a profitable commodity from India. It was the favoured cargo for ships coming to China to collect tea, thus countering making their outward voyage unladen. While the Chinese imperial government banned the import of opium in 1800, the trade continued to boom, via smuggling, on a large scale. A measure of this was evidenced by the existence of several fleets of heavily armed fast tea clippers. These vessels could out-run and out-gun any ship in the Chinese navy. At almost the same time as action against the opium problem was being taken, a political crisis was unfolding within China for the ruling Manchu Qing Dynasty. Britain, Japan, Germany, France, Russia and then later the United States of America all took advantage of the slow process of the implosion of this regime. Moment three was the arrival of large numbers of scientific, technical and then, in less numbers, political, philosophical, historical, sociological and economic texts from the West from the 1860s onward. This was problematically and contradictorily

China vs China: conflict and translation 15

done in order to modernise the nation technically and economically as a means to combat modernity. By the end of the century Japan had defeated China in war and had seized Korea and Taiwan, both of which had previously been under Chinese control. By this time Germany had gained exclusive mining rights in Shandong province and controlled other areas including Jiaozhou, while Russia had gained the rights to build a railroad across Manchuria and ruled the Liaodong Peninsula; Britain was in dominance in Weihaiwei and the Yangtze Valley, and France was in dominance in Guangzhou and other southern provinces. Although not completely occupied by one colonial power China was divided into specific colonial ‘spheres of influence’. After the acceptance of a proposal by the United States of America in 1900 an ‘open door’ policy establishing free access to all Chinese territory was agreed; this by all the European nations with ‘interests’ in this territory. Their base aim was purely to exploit the nation rather than expend military and administrative resources in trying to conquer and rule it. These events converged to deliver what was to become three-quarters of a century of humiliation. This situation was to have a profound effect upon subsequent political events in the nation and on its actions in the world (including up to the present). More now needs to be said about this period.

Wars of humiliation At the opening of the nineteenth century, China was the largest country in the world with a population of just over 400 million people (Chesneaux et al. 1977). At that time its borders extended to Tsarist Russia, Outer and Inner Mongolia. The Qing Dynasty had ruled China since the seventeenth century and it was a continuation of the same Confucian socio-cultural order of preceding dynasties. Its only real differences were that it made Manchu the nation’s second official language after Mandarin, and that it closed off Manchuria to peasants (to protect its rich uncultivated land for its own people). This latter act was significant because it was done at a time of a rapidly expanding population. Huge numbers of people were making demands for land; this situation became politically extremely contentious (Chesneaux et al. 1977). By 1830 opium had escalated to a problem for the government and the population at large. It was causing widespread social dysfunction. The problem had been made worse once the British East India Company’s trading monopoly had ended. As a result the volume of opium being smuggled into the country rapidly expanded. In 1838, the Emperor sent officials to Guangzhou to arrest Chinese opium dealers and to demand foreign firms to turn over their stocks of the substance. They refused. Consequently the foreign residents of the city lost their freedom, this to force merchants to surrender their opium so it could be destroyed. The action ‘backfired’ and the British government dispatched troops from India to liberate the city. This action resulted in a war that started in 1839. With their extra firepower the British inflicted a great deal of damage on Chinese coastal settlements. The Chinese capitulated and made major concessions,

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as was evidenced in the 1842 Treaty of Nanking. The Treaty reinstated the opium trade, gave favourable trade tariffs and other economic and diplomatic benefits for the British. It also meant that territory was ceded to them, including Hong Kong and the opening of Shanghai and Guangzhou to British trade and residence. Then during 1856, the Second Opium War started as a result of the British inflaming the significance of what was a minor diplomatic event.2 On 25 June 1859 the British bombarded the forts guarding the mouth of the Hai River, below Tientsin. On sending landing parties ashore to take a defensive position they met stiff resistance. Meanwhile, British ships were being seriously damaged by the coastal defence guns of the Chinese garrison. The British withdrew, but in May the following year a joint British/French amphibious expeditionary force arrived with 18,000 troops. They landed unopposed, and under the guns of their naval ships took the ‘Taku forts’. The expedition then advanced towards Peking. At the request of the Chinese, the British and French were invited to talks on an armistice. A delegation was formed and sent. There were no talks, rather it was a ruse and the group was captured and imprisoned. Nevertheless the expedition pressed ahead. On 26 September 1860 the expedition reached Peking, having defeated 30,000 Chinese troops in two battles en route. On arrival in the city an assault on the Old Summer Palace was made, thereafter it was occupied, looted and burnt. A Chinese request for peace was then made and accepted. China agreed to all demands. In defeat the Chinese were once again forced to unfavourable terms already inscribed in the 1858 Treaty of Tientsin. This Treaty ‘improved’ British trade interests by opening new ports to trade and allowing foreigners to travel in the interior. In addition, Christians gained the right to propagate their religion. The United States of America and Russia later obtained the same prerogatives in separate treaties. As all subsequent Chinese accounts made clear, the loss of the Opium Wars had serious consequences for China well beyond just a military defeat. Seen in military terms, in relation to the scale of internal conflicts developing in China at the time, it was a comparatively minor conflict with an external power. However, it was nonetheless an economic disaster, viewed as globally humiliating and as a deep wound to national pride. But most seriously, what it exposed was that China was not modern, especially militarily and technologically. Effectively the nation was not able to defend itself from any external aggressor of substance. Realising this directly affected how the nation viewed itself, its position in the world, its past and its future. So while the effect of the Opium Wars prompted a process of modernisation, what actually occurred was not a clear and resolved course of action producing the desired and expected result.

Modernity and the contradiction of resistance At the most practical level what was absolutely apparent to Chinese ruling officials was that, if China was going to be able to defend itself from external aggressive

China vs China: conflict and translation 17

powers, China had to acquire Western military technology. This meant the creation of a modern arms industry, which created in turn: hiring foreign experts, buying foreign machinery, gaining new knowledge, training Chinese workers with new skills, building ship yards and arsenals. All of this went counter to the conservative Confucian worldview of the nation’s ruling elite; it heralded the coming of another age: the modern. Notwithstanding disdain for what this meant, accounts of the period indicated that there was recognition by the elite that military and economic modernisation was essential. However, there was absolutely no realisation of what the cultural implications of modernisation would be, nor any notion of it triggering a process of needed social reform. Modernity, in its economic–military form, was simply seen as a path to the nation’s ‘self strengthening’, the name given to the structurally contradictory reform movement that sought to both retain and abandon values drawn for the past. The movement started in 1861 and lasted to 1895. The first ten years of the ‘Self-Strengthening Movement’ focused on learning about and adopting Western scientific and technical knowledge on weapons, machines, manufacturing methods and training. Foreign experts were hired, shipyards and arsenals were built and educational institutions established (we will be looking at one of these, the Kiangnan Arsenal in Shanghai, in a moment). The second phase (1872–1885) marked a shift to a broader economic project of developing industry, agriculture and wealth generation. But these efforts were weakened by administrative inertia, organisational inefficiency, nepotism and corruption. The final phase (1885–1895) was marked by an almost total loss of momentum. The technical attainments of the movement were at best mixed. What is of particular interest is how events during this period created a milieu of translation, dominantly of texts concerned with science and technology. These texts were not just produced for, or contained by, their immediate context of use, as they constituted a hermeneutical environment in which the industrial ethos and epistemological ground of instrumentalism was still only partly present. This context was the arsenals, created as a ‘flagship’ of Chinese modern industry. Within this setting there were very few workers who had been inducted into a designed and systemised industrial means of production, with its accompanying work ethic. Equally, the organisational structure of this workplace was based on Confucian methods of administration that Western and Chinese reports suggested undermined the efforts of imported experts (some of whom, it transpired, lacked expertise).3 All this is to say that there was cultural recoil from seemingly ‘objective’ technical information. What is being observed here is a contradictory relation of appropriation of the modern together with resistance to it. The wish to be economically modern while keeping cultural modernity at bay was clearly evident on many social levels. As a result, the prompt to act pragmatically became negated in the workplace by the pragmatic textual means of implementation. At the same time, and again in contradiction, the dissemination of the texts did constitute a wider audience who embraced, and were interpellated by, the modern. And of course the officials who made the decision to modernise arms production were far removed from both the

18 Tony Fry

theoretical and practical tools of modernisation. Effectively the meta-content of these texts had a designing ability not so much because they had an applied use but more through their epistemic agency to author modern subjects, even in the face of resistance. At a fundamental level, the designing of the means of modernity, the conceptualisation that brought together machines, industrial processes, what they produced, the industrial workplace, modern technical and scientific knowledge, took on a life of its own, independent of the limitations of the project of weapons production. But the process of the making of the modern (in mind and matter) was to be protracted and painful and carried by the agency of ‘designing things’ (via their ontological affect). Of course the designing action of these ‘things’ (especially weapons and machine tools) was not understood from a theoretically informed perspective, but rather simply as a consequence of the superiority of their instrumental function being recognised and adopted as normative. Supporting the creation of the manufactured things was equally the agency of textually bound, technically instructive knowledge. In this setting there was always a tension between the values of Confucianism and what were taken to be the pragmatic benefits of modernity. This tension of keeping things the same while embracing change was seemingly present at every level of innovation. In the workplace it was evident in old modes of organisation applied to new production technologies, but this tension was certainly not just confined to industrial production. Likewise, it was evident in the dilemmas experienced by translators over their allegiance to cultural origin (tradition) as opposed to political agency (change); this in relation to the intended readers’ induction into modern knowledge via the translated texts. Such tensions were causally present at a much larger scale, as seen, for example, in the many Chinese rebellions of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries wherein change and innovation clashed. The weakness of the Qing Dynasty, and its inability to manage change, was deeply implicated in extending the trauma of the nation, as both historical events and the writing of its critics within China affirmed. And while the Opium Wars had serious consequences, there were other major internal conflicts that put the regime’s very survival into question. While during the entirety of the nineteenth century China was rife with rebellions, by mid-century they took on a new proportion. They became massive forces of fragmentation and as such played a key part in positioning China as a nation split between retaining the values and practices of the past while making the new.

Rebellions and birth of the borderlands Borderlands, as a locus of ‘betweenness’, are where ‘old thinking’ collides with the new, wherein the time of the past is touched by the emergent time of the future. In such a setting, translation becomes a spatial as well as a textual intervention. Borderland conditions thus become generative of border thinking. This means

China vs China: conflict and translation 19

they are locations wherein being(s) and knowledge exist disjunctively. So situated, border thinking is thought beyond the efficacy of existing and conflicting epistemologies. Moreover, borderlands are also where the worldviews that underpin those epistemologies clash and implode in the face of contextual contradictions. The extremity of this situation in nineteenth-century China meant that the borderland not only marked cultural and political disjunctures, but also a space by violent confrontation. These points will be grounded in an interpretation of the position taken by the Self-Strengthening Movement. As indicated, the agenda of the Self-Strengthening Movement as a reform movement was created out of the debacle of the Opium Wars. According to position, it could be read as both progressive and regressive and thus aligned to either side of a conflict between forces of modernity and tradition. Yet it did register a pragmatic realisation of the necessity of the modernisation of China (in the first instance technologically) in order to protect the nation militarily and economically. But at the same time another pragmatic was in play, the displacement of political pressure to respond to the prospect of future threats from foreign aggressors by taking demonstrable action. Here, then, was the ground out of which its contradictions emerged. To make the complexity, the scale of the tragedy of nineteenth-century China and its rebellions and associated borderland clearer, another historical frame of reference will be added that situates the issues in actual events. In so doing the Taiping Rebellion will be given special attention. What this rebellion made clear was that the nation, in dealing with events that were fragmenting it, was itself fragmented (not least militarily). During the nineteenth century there were five major rebellions in addition to the Taiping Rebellion. The century opened with an ongoing rebellion by the Buddhist White Lotus Sect. After centuries of persecution the sect rebelled against the Qing government. Their struggle lasted eight years and, while the government tried to exterminate them, they lived on, and an offshoot of the organisation joined the Nien Rebellion of 1842. The Nien Rebellion took place in northern China (1851–1868). It was a revolt against ‘rural misery’ conducted by ‘poor peasants or ex-peasants struggling to survive in a bleak environment of worked-out soil, harsh winters and unstable river systems subject to appalling floods’ (Spence 1990, p. 184). It was directed against the Qing government and its incompetence. The Nien were well organised, were well armed with modern weapons and had fastmoving cavalry. It took over two years for a large Qing regime military operation, equipped with expensive European artillery and small arms, to crush this rebellion. The Miao, the aboriginal and mountain tribal people of Guizhou, like the Nien, were extremely poor. They lacked sufficient arable land to adequately support themselves. Added to this situation, they had a long history of oppression by Han Chinese (including two rebellions in the eighteenth century). When in 1854 the Qing government increased taxes and withdrew troops keeping peace in the area (both as result of the outbreak of the Taiping Rebellion) a local rebellion commenced and lasted until 1873. It has been suggested that several million of the total

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population of seven million perished in the conflict at the hand of Qing troops. Record keeping in relation to this and other such events was poor so the numbers could be more or less. The Du Wenxiu Rebellion (1856–1872) was a Muslim uprising by the Hui people against the Qing regime in Yunnan Province, as part of a larger wave of Muslim antagonism towards the government (Spence 1990). Their aim was to break away from China, but they did not succeed and Qing troops eventually crushed the rebels and thereafter hundreds of thousands of Hui were massacred. There were two more Hui uprisings (1862–1877 and 1895–1896), by people from Gansu, Ningxia and Shaanxi. The last rebellion of the century was the one best known to the outside world as the Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901), by ‘The Righteous and Harmonious Fists’ (hence the name Boxer), and was against Europeans and other foreigners in China, their commercial interests, religious activities, the import of science and technology, and the influence of advisors and technical experts. While a rebellion against the modern, it was also against the Qing government, which it held responsible for the loss of status of China, the diminishment of the nation’s pride in itself and its military humiliation. While millions died in these rebellions, what drew the focus of the world’s media in 1900 was the killing of 230 foreigners and thousands of Chinese Christians. While all these rebellions were significant, the Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864) was of a different order. The measure of this difference was its scale, which was summed up by the commentators Michael Franz and S. Y. Teng, remarking that ‘modern Chinese history begins with the Taiping Rebellion. Effectively over two thousand years of imperial history came to an end and a period of political, social and intellectual turmoil commenced’ (Franz and Chang 1966, p. 3). Essentially the rebellion was a quasi-nationalist exercise of modernist reform based on Chinese peasants recoiling against tradition and the degenerate Qing regime. The uprising started in Southern China in 1850 and rebels took Nanking in 1853. They used the city as their base for 11 years, during which time conflict spread over 16 of China’s 18 provinces. Statistical accounts of these events were very poor, but there are estimates that suggest that between 20 and 40 million people died in the conflict, and thereafter another 20–30 million died from starvation. It was reported in the West at the time as ‘the greatest movement of the nineteenth century’ and ‘one of the greatest movements of human history’ (Teng 1971, p. 1). But who outside China remembers it now? While the Taiping Rebellion shared the common objective of other rebellions of overthrowing the Qing Dynasty, it differed by having an overt social and political agenda of change. Led by Hung Hsiu-ch’uan, a failed academic and village schoolteacher, who was generally regarded as a radical eccentric with bizarre Christian beliefs (who was claimed to both ‘pervert the faith’ but equally inspire millions). Its supporters saw the rebellion as progressive and revolutionary – this because it promoted equality, abolished private property, banned drugs, advocated sexual equality, and put forward social and political programmes. Central to its programme, and the ability of the rebellion to gain support from peasants, was its

China vs China: conflict and translation 21

policy of land reform.4 Likewise, at least initially, it was well disciplined and organised as a large and well-trained fighting force (when it took Nanking it was with 500,000 soldiers). So characterised, it was pitted against the forces of a corrupt and humiliated empire that was in decline. While the Qing regime was a disintegrating political order (badly administering an impoverished society) it still had a formidable fighting force made up of a number of armies (there was no unified national army). However, the pressure on the rebels of keeping its fighters in the field supplied and motivated over 14 years, meant that the rebellion slowly faltered and was eventually crushed. The West, especially Britain, had backed the Qing government; in part because of the strange religion being espoused by the rebels but mostly to protect its economic interests (Spence 1990). A mixture of foreign troops were involved in supporting the Qing regime, but, according to Michael Franz, their role was overrated (Franz and Chang 1966). The revolutionary spirit and action of the Chinese Rebellions, especially the Taiping, captured the imagination of European socialists. It was thought that they could spark such activities elsewhere, including in Europe. Most prominent among the writings on the political events in China and their revolutionary potential was a series of articles authored by Karl Marx first published from 14 June 1853 in the New York Daily Tribune.5

The weakness of the Self-Strengthening Movement The government of the Qing Dynasty, as the vehicle of the Manchu regime, in the face of the military and economic actions of foreign powers and the Muslim and Taiping Rebellions, unavoidably confronted the need for reform. As already said, they did this by creating the Self-Strengthening Movement and in a way that, while appearing to be pragmatic, was actually auto-destructive. By setting out to set up the means to acquire Western knowledge, technology, industrial methods, weapons and even language to, in the end, gain not only an ability for China to defend itself, but to eventually rise to a position of equality with the West. Second, and in contradiction, they reaffirmed tradition by maintaining faith in the function and power of conservative Confucian institutions to hold the fabric of Chinese civilisation together and to provide the moral ground for future governments. In this context, ‘self-strengthening’ was based not just on modernisation but on a reinforcement of the rule of an archetype, the ‘exemplary man’ (jen, the being, the Confucian subject that excelled) and of government based on the value of Confucian humanness. In so doing what failed to be understood was that the appropriation of the instrumental means of the modern world arrived with a metaphysical foundation which directly delivered, and opened the door to, the inscriptive power of colonising epistemologies. Moreover, what the history of the next 70 years demonstrated was that the pragmatics of the movement mostly failed and that conservative Confucianism was unable to hold the flow of Western thinking at bay. The borderland opened by the Self-Strengthening Movement created a passing moment

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and space in which two very different worlds and modes of thinking collided. But the one event that more than any other exposed the failure of the Self-Strengthening Movement to hold this moment and to be able modernise and reform the Qing Dynasty’s military capability and fend off threats to the nation and its sovereignty was the First Sino-Japanese War (1895–1895) (Lone 1994). The trigger for the conflict centred on Japan and its ambitions towards Korea, which had been a ‘tributary state’ under the directive influence of China. Japan was in the process of moving from a feudal to a modern society, and in so doing the nation was modernising its navy (which it based on the British model) and its army (using the French as a modern example to follow). At the same time, it was also looking to establish a more secure position in the region. To do this it decided to annex Korea before another power did so. It was this action that sparked the war. The view from Europe was that China had modern warships and large trained armies that were well equipped with modern weapons, and would certainly crush the aggression from Japan. The actual result of the conflict was the reverse. The better organisation, training, tactics and equipment of the Japanese overwhelmed opposition from the Chinese. The Qing Dynasty suffered another huge humiliating defeat. Its navy was all but destroyed and its armies were routed in a series of crucial battles. Thereafter it signed another economically and politically disastrous treaty (the Treaty of Shimonoseki, 1895). Links with Korea ended and Japanese forces occupied Taiwan (which was formally under Chinese control) and China had to pay a vast sum to Japan for war reparations. The result was that China’s standing in the world was diminished and Japan’s increased. The defeat inflicted a massive psychological blow to Chinese pride and exposed the absolute incompetence of the Qing regime to the world: its fate was sealed (the Qing Dynasty was overthrown by the Xinhai Revolution of 1911, which established the Republic of China).

On the agency of knowledge The Self-Strengthening Movement posited a good deal of faith in establishing an infrastructure that could transfer Western science and technology, especially in terms of modern weapons of war, to China. The idea was to create an ‘anti-imperial industry’ equipped with the knowledge and means needed to produce the kinds of weapons used by ‘the foreign enemy’ so that China could defeat any foreign aggressor. By 1895 there were 41 arsenals ‘scattered along the Chinese coast and dotting inland waterways’ (Kennedy 1978, p. 1). One of the main, and earliest, of these institutions was the giant Kiangnan Arsenal in Shanghai founded in 1865.

Knowledge as a weapon and ‘knowing things’ Thomas L. Kennedy documented the history of Kiangnan Arsenal at length in a number of books and articles during the 1960s and 1970s. What follows is largely drawn from these publications, along with Adrian Bennett’s book on translator John Fryer (Bennett 1967).

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The Arsenal manufactured rifles, field artillery and coastal defence guns as well as building ships in its own shipyard. Everything made was based on already designed existing internationally manufactured models (mostly from Britain, the United States of America, Germany and Japan) produced by local workers and ‘experts’ using imported machine tools.6 While there were attainments – some of the weapons made were of a comparable standard to those upon which they were based – there were many qualitative and structural problems over the history of the Arsenal, which functioned in a reduced form until the 1930s, albeit as a major site of production its life had ended by 1911. Some of the main problems of the Arsenal stemmed from poor financial management, high production costs and the under-capitalisation of machinery. Nepotism and corruption were also claimed to be omnipresent, as was a clash between a system based on traditional Confucian methods of administration and modern modes of industrial production. Thomas Kennedy’s accounts of everyday life at the Arsenal suggested this clash meant that it was extremely hard to establish a modern work ethic. Notwithstanding its rates of pay being dramatically higher than other local workplaces, cultural resistance by workers to becoming modernised was described as a major feature of the workplace. At a more general level, defence policy failures by the Qing government also undermined the modernisation and creation of Chinese Arsenal. For example, there was never a national standard on the bore size for rifles, which meant that different arsenals manufactured different models of varied calibres. This in turn created major logistical problems for the nation’s armies, not least in the supply and distribution of ammunition. Likewise, huge numbers of rifles were manufactured at Kiangnan, but at times there were serious problems of quality.7 Another problem often arose when it was decided to introduce a new model. This was sometimes done without investing in new machinery, basically because of a gap in the technical knowledge of decision makers and a lack of dialogue between them and the experts they had recruited. The result was that some functions had to be completed by hand, which meant output and quality dropped and costs increased. While a great deal of the knowledge sought to be transferred to a new technocratic class in China via education and training by foreign experts, as well as by translated publications, knowledge inscribed in the designed weapons and technologies imported was significant, although this has largely gone unrecognised. The very act of reverse engineering – working back through the logic of the manufacturing techniques and assembly methods of a product to expose the detail of its design rationale, component function, performative capability, machining methods, material specifications and so on – was effective induction into a mode of thought, knowledge and learning. A rifle, for instance, is not just an assemblage of parts but is equally a composite object of knowledge whereby its mechanics, physics and chemistry are brought into a sought optimal functional relation with each other. Thus, mechanical function has to be understood as being indivisible from metallurgy and the management of, for example, the displacement of heat, which itself is connected to the

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type of propellant charge, barrel thickness, machining characteristics (like its ‘rifling’), length and created muzzle velocity. All performative objects arrive out of, and carry, a theory of knowledge and functional intent, which is to say that designed objects and their technologies are epistemologically inscribed. To empirically discover this is not merely an act of disclosure, or the revelation of potential design innovations, but also it is an exposure to a process of ontological change through an encounter with new knowledge linking to the gaining of new skills. It follows that instruction and training are not purely delimited by their intended functionalist ends but equally are directive of subject(ive) change. Collectively, such ‘knowing things’ constitute ‘a world’ – one in which industrial culture shaped the working environment and mindscape. So framed, the Kiangnan ‘world of things’ (material and textual) was intended to form such an environment. Thus the Arsenal did not just exist for the production of weapons, but rather was equally about making a paradigmatic model towards a technical culture of modernity; one that was taken from the West and attempted to be modified for a (Confucian) Chinese context. But, as already indicated, the result to realise this ambition was contradictory. To better understand this more needs to be said about modernity.

Modernity against modernity: living the contradiction The universal objective of Western modernity was to extend the power of the West, increase its wealth and subordinate all Others that could threaten its position. But, as Walter Mignolo and other theorists of colonialism and decolonisation have made clear, there is no modernity without coloniality (Mignolo 2000). At the same time, Walter Mignolo also acknowledged colonial difference within the modern nation-state (Mignolo 2000). These perspectives need to be brought to the complexity of China and the relation considered between: (i) external aggression between the economic and military action of imperial Western nations towards China; and (ii) internal violence within China by its own imperial regime attempting to retain power in the face of the nation’s own subaltern classes and cultures; we can see not only a very complex historical situation but also one in which decolonisation is not a straightforward process (not that it ever is). What will become increasingly clear is that the process of decolonisation, as predicated upon a ‘delinking and disengaging’ from Western epistemology, was contrary to China’s action in the nineteenth century as it set out to modernise, and so liberate itself from the threat of Western aggression and economic exploitation via selectively appropriating techno-instrumental elements of modernity (Mignolo 2011). However, as will increasingly be revealed, Western science and technology could not be quarantined from Western modernity at large, or the

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anti-imperialism of imperial China (as was evident in the contradictory project of the Self-Strengthening Movement). Within the internal process of resistance to Qing imperialism, the Movement was mostly viewed as aligned to the past not the future. A ‘war on the past’ by ‘progressives’ was partly a war on the historical reach of imperial power, and its efforts to infiltrate ‘the new’ and delimit its transformative capability. What is evident here is a historical trace within China running from the Taiping Rebellion (as ‘the modern’ against ‘tradition’) right through to Mao Zedong’s ‘Cultural Revolution’ (of the 1960s and beyond).

Translators and translation China has a long history of translation that constitutes a context for the appropriation of technology and technological knowledge; some of the earliest translations being Buddhist Sanskrit texts from India approximately 2,500 years ago. Likewise, around the first century before present Al-Tusi Nasir Al-Din was translating Euclid’s Elements, Plato’s Logic and a 36-volume Arabic Pharmacopoeia. Between 1582 and 1723 some 70 Jesuit missionaries, as the first people to introduce texts from the West, worked with Chinese collaborators, to translate Western works of theology, science and technology. Following their expulsion in 1723 there was no more translation until the 1840s.8 Two very different translators are about to be considered: one English, the other Chinese. Both were profoundly touched by events in China in the same period, and both men were important in terms of the arrival of modernity in China, but not in the same way. The first translator to be considered is John Fryer. He has gained passing reference in a number of texts but, apart from a few publications, is largely overlooked. The second translator Yan Fu has attracted a lot of attention and is the focus of a large literature, especially in China and Japan. The point of commenting upon them is to expose how their respective projects add to our understanding of China and its relation to modernity. Our focus centres on the nature of the translations that these two men produced. Those by John Fryer were extensive, but while Yan Fu’s are equally extensive they are contentious and hotly debated. While there is a great deal of debate on the comparative meaning and language between translated texts, discovering the absolutely correct and true meaning is beyond resolution. Put into the language of post-structuralism: the issue is indeterminate. Yes, the question of textual affect can be explored, but the nuances of the author’s intent cannot. Thus, while comment can be and is made on, for example, Yan Fu’s use of ancient Confucian language, the truth of his actual intent cannot be revealed and claimed.

John Fryer (1839–1928)9 In order to improve his financial position, John Fryer took up a post as a translator at the Kiangnan Arsenal in May 1868 (Bennett 1967). As acknowledged,

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translation of Western knowledge was one of the key objectives of the SelfStrengthening Movement, the creation of which was informed by an influential essay written in 1861 by Feng Kuei-fen, a prominent scholar of the day (Bennett 1967).10 Effectively this view formed the basis of the Arsenal’s translation policy. The translators themselves were given free rein to select the material to be translated, and the methods they used were exactly the same as those used by the Jesuits (a Western translator with feedback from a Chinese reader) (Bennett 1967). John Fryer spent 35 years in China, for 28 of those years working as a translator. In 1896 he left China to take up a founding professorship in Oriental languages and literature at the University of California, Berkeley. As Adrian Bennett Eurocentrically puts it ‘he occupied himself with the exacting task of translating Western technical literature into a difficult and exotic language’ (Bennett 1967, p. 2). John Fryer translated 77 books that were published by the Kiangnan Arsenal in five categories: natural science, applied science, military and naval science, history, and social science. In other capacities he translated another 52 books. It should be said that there are some variations on these numbers, with the claim that 12 books are unaccounted for – either way, it’s a lot of translation. John Fryer’s own position was contradictory, and in turn he mirrored the contradictions of the institution that employed him. In one respect he was driven by personal ambitions (Bennett 1967).11 At the same time he identified with the aims of the Self-Strengthening Movement and in an unpublished essay at the end of his career wrote that he was able to ‘understand foreigners and to be able to fight them successfully, and drive them away altogether’ (Bennett 1967, p. 69). To get a fuller picture of John Fryer’s activities, to gauge his influence on China and to assess the actual agency of the works he translated, his life beyond the Arsenal is worth comment. In 1875 he participated in establishing China’s first public library of scientific books (the Shanghai Polytechnic Institute, 1884–1917) and the Ko-chih hui-pien (a Chinese scientific journal). The Polytechnic introduced an essay competition in 1884, framed by John Fryer with the intent that essay entrants: ‘read, think and write on foreign subjects of practical utility’. Ten years later the Polytechnic commenced classes and the presentation of lectures. For similar ends, in 1877 John Fryer worked with missionary schoolteachers. Together they had formed a ‘textbook committee’ with the aim of improving scientific books for use in Christian and other schools (he was appointed editor for the committee in 1879 when they launched a series of books that covered ten subjects12). The largest project was created in 1884 when John Fryer formed the Chinese Scientific Book Deposit (Bennett 1967).13 Adrian Bennett in his useful but largely uncritical account of John Fryer and his work asserts that the man had ‘a profound influence upon China’ (Bennett 1967). The extent of this influence, and exactly how significant it was, begs engaging and tempering with other perspectives. For instance, of his general influence Jonathan Spence says: ‘Fryer consistently over emphasised his own influence in the Arsenal, and the rewards that his endeavours would bring’ (Spence 1969, p. 151). More

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recently and critically, Benjamin Elman suggests we should not overlook his ‘wilful infiltration of Christian beliefs in many scientific textbooks translated into Chinese that influence men like Yan Fu and Lu Xun who trained at the Fuzhou Shipyard and Jiangnan Arsenal’ (Elman 2001, p. 130). These observations may be true, but they do not really get to the most critical issue. For what John Fryer was doing, and in a very underdeveloped way recognised, was to be a vector delivering the instrumentalism of Western metaphysics as a mode of operational cognition. While claiming to be against the colonising of China by modern nations (by enabling the creation of a ‘technology of resistance’) the subjects to whom the texts were directed were themselves being colonised. But in contradiction, as is evident in his writing and commentary on it, he still viewed Western civilisation as ‘superior’. The main point here is not so much that knowledge and technology can be prevented from being transferred, but rather that it is not a neutral act. If done, questions of conscious critical mediation arrive. The ideological substrate of John Fryer’s translation was not just inflected by Western Christian beliefs but also a faith in the rational mind of the Enlightenment. Effectively, as Thomas Kennedy pointed out, ‘the anti-imperialist thrust of Chinese arsenals was diminished by prevailing conditions of foreign dependency, or semi-colonialism’ (Kennedy 1978, p. 150); clearly translation was implicated in this process. John Fryer not only had a vested interest in extending such dependency for his own ends, but he was also implicated in extending it via the ontological designing agency of the texts he translated (texts are not consumed, rather they produce in the act of reading). In other words, the question of influence does not rest with the man but with the texts, and the evidence of this influence is vested in the very form of modernising that China adopted (and the nation’s ongoing contemporary relation to technology). As for the assessment of John Fryer’s career, one might be more inclined to accept a counter-reading of Jonathan Spence’s Eurocentric judgement over Adrian Bennett’s more rosy perspective. Jonathan Spence remarks that, while John Fryer worked hard he ‘always remained in a subordinate position’, and in the context of his earlier career dreams and ambition his move to Berkeley was a defeat for, as Spence puts it, ‘the Chinese had taken the best of his years, and used him as they saw fit’ (Spence 1969, p. 156). John Fryer had not gained any substantial promotion or significant increases in salary. However, as an advocate of utility to the Chinese, perhaps his treatment by them was a true measure of his influence! Certainly a consideration of John Fryer’s wider activities would lend credibility to Spence’s view that in ‘bringing science to the Chinese John Fryer spread himself very thin. This slightly frenzied yet diffuse method of operating mirrored the times in China’ (Spence 1969, p. 154). Of course, what John Fryer failed to discover was the rich and complex history of Chinese science, including the science of metallurgy that Joseph Needham was to document in the mid-twentieth century and that was subsequently further elaborated after his death by his colleague Donald Wagner.14 Certainly, had he gained

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this knowledge, his sense of the superiority of Western knowledge would have perhaps been undercut (which is one of the main contributions to the Western mind of Joseph Needham’s project).

Yan Fu (1853–1921) The status of Yan Fu puts John Fryer in perspective and provides a truer measure of his influence. The complexity and contradictions of China that have been sketched are, in microcosm, very apparent in the thought, life and work of Yan Fu, who has been widely regarded as the most significant translator of his age and ‘the first Chinese literatus who relates himself seriously, rigorously, and in a sustained fashion to modern Western thought’ (Schwartz 1964, p. 3).15 There is a large Chinese literature on him, his writing and translation. A good deal of this material has been reviewed, at length, by Elsie Kit Ying Chan in her 2003 doctoral thesis in translation studies. Framed by the contextualisation of Western knowledge in China’s efforts to modernise, and current thinking on the relation between modernity, coloniality and decoloniality, comment here will draw on Chan’s insights, together with Benjamin Schwartz’s 1964 influential book on Yan Fu’s relation to the West (Chan 2003; Schwartz 1964). Schwartz’s work on Yan Fu has had special attention in Japan where Yan’s works are an established area of study.16 Additionally, and more recently, Max Ko-wu Huang’s book on Yan Fu and liberalism is an important contribution to the discussion (Huang 2008). Born in Fuzhou, Yan Fu was educated in his early years in the Confucian and Neo-Confucian tradition. At the age of 13 he gained a studentship at the modern Fuzhou Shipyard School where he was educated in English, mathematics, the sciences and Chinese studies by British instructors. From any early age he was inculcated into a dichotomy between a Confucian and Western worldview, as well as into a Self-Strengthening Movement cadre. In 1871, after graduation, he went to sea for a number of years, serving on several ships, then, in 1877, he was selected with six other students to study at Britain’s Greenwich Royal Naval College. His formal and informal education in Britain widened his intellectual interests. On return to Fuzhou in 1879 he was appointed as an instructor. His career progressed rapidly and by 1890, at the age of 37 he was made Principal of the Northern Sea Naval Academy. Benjamin Schwartz suggests that Yan Fu’s appointment to this position proved to be both attainment and a frustration. He felt his talents were not being appropriately recognised and used, and as a result he became depressed and acquired an opium habit (Schwartz 1964). It was during the 1890s, drawing upon the intellectual interest he had developed in England, and contrary to the nature of the position he held (and the Self-Strengthening Movement and the ethos that underpinned it), that Yan Fu developed an independent and critical position. His essays from this period exposed his alienation from the instrumentalist position of the Movement as it simply reduced Western knowledge to utility. At the same time, he had commenced

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translating, with his translation of Thomas Henry Huxley’s Ethics and Evolution appearing in 1898. In comparison to his peers his public career had stalled, although his position as an educator was still progressing, and in the end his star once more ascended. So, by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century ‘his reputation as a sage was firmly established’ with his appointment to a series of senior public appointments (including in 1908 as Chief Reviser of the Committee for the Compilation of Technical Terms where he would re-encounter John Fryer, whose texts he would have known from his days at the Fuzhou Shipyard School) (Chan 2003, p. 213). Then in 1910 he gained the rank of ‘Illustrious Scholar’. Finally in 1915 he was appointed to the drafting committee of the Constitution of the Republic of China (Chan 2003, p. 106). It is unclear in the documented history whether Yan Fu’s mid-career setback was because of the official reception of his expressed views, his opium addiction (which did not intellectually disable him) or because he was just traumatised by the massive social, political and economic turmoil of his age, which included the implosion of the Confucian tradition that had sustained Chinese civilisation for over two millennia. The Sino-Japanese war was said to have especially affected him; the loss of the war, Elsie Kit Ying Chan says, was a ‘watershed in his life’ (Chan 2003, p. 71). She also remarks: ‘Throughout his life, Yan witnessed the potent aggression of Western imperial powers, the devastation of domestic uprisings and a dwindling economy’ (Chan 2003, p. 56). In this situation what he tried to do was to establish a position that could accommodate Confucianism with Western modernity, and in so doing prefigured what has become a contemporary strain of Chinese thought. Eventually, in significant part because of the First World War, he turned his back with some bitterness on the West and returned to the mysticism of Lao-Tzu (Schwartz 1964). In some respects his projects overlapped with John Fryer’s, but at a much higher level, and with a clearer articulation of Chinese tradition. In Yan Fu’s view, British positivism could offset the ‘fuzziness and idealism’ of Chinese thought. He had a view that ‘scientific epistemologies and systematic methodologies’ (Chan 2003, p. 87) could give the traditional Confucianism the ability to govern in the modern world. The way he believed this could be done was by positivism reforming ancient thinking which, in turn, would reform the institutions of government (Chan 2003). Likewise, his larger and more complex vision of translation embraced the recognition of the extent and impact of Western thought on Chinese intellectual life and the developmental future of the nation. It was out of these understandings that Yan Fu invested so much of his life in the task of translating works that he believed to have directive importance in the making of China’s future. In common with the far cruder Kiangnan Arsenal project, what Yan Fu was doing was positing an absolute faith in science, but from a very particular stance in Western metaphysics, grounded in an evolutionary epistemology centred on Herbert Spencer’s quasi vitalism. This knowledge would, he believed, constitute an elite who would be able to ‘spread civilised ideas among the people’ (Schwartz 1964, p. 39).

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While criticised for seeming to be pro-Western, Yan Fu, as Chan tells us, was actually trying to fuse a traditional ensemble of Confucian values, especially ethics, with Western thought (but we note within a particular paradigm). His mission in so doing, we are told, was to search for and find a dao (way) that would enable China to fit into an ever-changing world (Chan 2003). One can contrast Elsie Kit Ying Chan’s with Benjamin Schwartz’s view of Yan Fu’s career, which he believed was to establish a certain affinity between ‘certain elements of Chinese thought’ and ‘certain elements of Western thought’ (Schwartz 1964, pp. 51–52) (many of the former being, he believed, inchoate forms of the latter). This search for ‘a way’ translated to an attempt to discover a politics based on a position of mediation from which to speak and act. While doing this was utopian and problematic, what it did expose was the Self-Strengthening Movement as a cynical and placatory exercise that sought to create (technological) appearance of change while at a fundamental level keeping things (including the rule of the Qing regime) the same. While both Elsie Kit Ying Chan and Benjamin Schwartz are extremely illuminating on Yan Fu, what neither of them did was to sufficiently engage the politically situated problem inherent in the works he translated. Essentially, this was via his reading of Thomas Henry Huxley, Herbert Spencer, Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill. He brought these thinkers together to constitute an epistemology of modernity via a synthesis of techno-scientific and socio-economic evolution. The knowledge assembled by Yan, and his linking commentary insinuated into the texts he translated, now looks like a form of textual manipulation (which became theorised by André Lefevere (Lefevere 1992). Yan Fu did this to ‘arm’ the informed elite, viewed as ‘philosopher kings of the future’. Elsie Kit Ying Chan partly gets to this point, but fails to develop it. The whole issue of framing these works, and Yan Fu’s project, within a wider view of modernity in fact never really arrives, and indeed while Elsie Kit Ying Chan’s central argument is about metaphor she never gets to recognise Yan Fu’s mobilisation of ‘wealth and power’ as simply a metaphor of the agency of modernity. Likewise, Benjamin Schwartz, for all his erudition and focus on ‘wealth and power’ (Schwartz 1964, pp. 188, 196), never actually directly arrived at Yan Fu’s attempt to constitute a mode of efficacy (as we would now understand it in China via François Jullien [2004] via a project of modernity sparking a Chinese Enlightenment). It seems that the hermeneutical preoccupations of almost all commentators on Yan Fu, including the more recent work by Max Ko-wu Huang, were so engrossed in arguments over how Yan Fu was viewed, on what he was saying, and his reading of the texts he translated (as well as the translations themselves and the relation between Confucian thought and language) that effectively the issues of modernity were overshadowed. Commentators just did not see the negative face of modernity, which was so clear in the history of Yan Fu’s age, as an overwhelming problematic, one that begged theorising. While recognised, a disaster that shaped so much of Yan Fu’s life and thought, and as that which divided the past from the future, the contradiction of his role as an agent and promoter of modernity ‘passed in the night’. In this context, debate over his pro-Western position is just not developed

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and marks a significant absence of critical reflection. One of the reasons for this is that modernity gets conflated with modernisation and (especially in Elsie Kit Ying Chan’s case) simply presented as the condition that was being transitioned to. The limitations and generalisation of Elsie Kit Ying Chan’s analysis were predated by Benjamin Schwartz, who nonetheless had a deeper grasp of the texts that inspired Yan Fu. For instance, this is clear when Elsie Kit Ying Chan approvingly cites Ouyang Zhesheng’s questionable and slight reading of Yan Fu’s oeuvre, suggesting that ‘Yan maintained a kind of rational balanced and eclectic attitude towards both Chinese and Western Culture and his later reflection is a result of a more profound understanding at a higher level of the two systems’ (Chan 2003, p. 113). What also fails to arrive, what again Elsie Kit Ying Chan and Benjamin Schwartz both overlooked, was the imbalance of Yan Fu’s understanding of Western philosophy. His engagement with Western thought was limited and selective and exclusively focused on positivism bonded to socio-political evolution, combined with an idealisation of British society, the state and the neo-classical economic pathfinding of Adam Smith et al., The Wealth of Nations (1825). As now can be seen, Yan Fu’s ambition was to transform China into a modern nation by acting as an agent of epistemological colonisation, one that fused ancient and modern empiricist ideas, together with his clear identification with capitalism as a source of Enlightenment and ‘economic development in general’ (Schwartz 1964, p. 129). This thinking, and the associated notion of enlightened self-interest, was totally at odds with his understanding of Confucian anti-materialism (Schwartz 1964). What Yan Fu deemed was needed (sounding rather like a neo-liberal Leninist) was ‘a “scientifically” guided reform promoted by enlightened elites’ (Schwartz 1964, p. 185). This is where John Stuart Mill came into the picture, for what Mill offered Yan Fu in his Logic (translated 1905) was a scientific and logical study of society. What Benjamin Schwartz suggested was that, what Yan Fu found between Herbert Spencer and J. S. Mill, was the mechanism to link abstract and practical science, ideas and action, so as to deliver ‘wealth and power’ (Schwartz 1964, pp. 188, 196), which here translates to modernity. As Benjamin Schwartz makes clear and in detail, Herbert Spencer’s work, The Study of Sociology (translated 1903) is centrally situated in Yan’s oeuvre and mindset. It extends Yan Fu’s foray into evolutionary theory advanced by his translation of Thomas Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics (translated 1898) and links to his reading of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (translated 1901/02) and more obliquely to the translations of J. S. Mill’s On Liberty (1903), but more directly to his Logic (1905). (Huang’s book is especially useful in drawing out the problems of Yan Fu’s reading of J. S. Mill, which in essence goes to issues around the nuances of J. S. Mill’s argument in the context of his philosophical milieu and the difficulty of finding Chinese equivalents for the elements of his arguments on logic.17) There is also the presence of a more general influence of Herbert Spencer in Yan Fu’s other and later translations.18 Yan Fu’s disposition towards Herbert Spencer, according to Benjamin Schwartz (and it rings true), was based on his particular understanding of evolution as he

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elaborated it via translation. Biological process did not interest Yan Fu, but what he did focus on was the transformation of human society, and Herbert Spencer offered what he thought to be the most sophisticated understanding of this process, posing the most advanced stage of human development within the social ‘organism’ in its ‘industrial stage’. Moreover, as Elsie Kit Ying Chan comments: Having a keen interest in Spencer’s speculative philosophy, Yan described his System of Synthetic Philosophy as the most extraordinary book in European history, applying the evolutionary theory to biology, psychology, sociology and morality and demonstrating the principles of ‘the preservation of the race’ and ‘progressive evolution’. (Chan 2003, p. 113)19 Here we see another issue that does not arrive in the contemporary writing on Yan Fu and his relation to Herbert Spencer: the question of race. This is a major absence as the issue connects debates on China and racism with Herbert Spencer to eugenics. The regressive notion ‘the preservation of the race’, and of race being a national unified power in China, as was explicated by Benjamin Schwartz, interestingly was being articulated at the same time as the very notion of race itself was starting to be discredited (Schwartz 1967). In 1897 W. E. B. Du Bois was concluding a seminal paper to be delivered to the American Negro Academy in which he pointed out: ‘even when we come to inquire into the essential difference of races we find it hard to come at once to any definite conclusion’ (cited in Appiah 1985, p. 23). As implied, what Yan Fu does very much in line with Elsie Kit Ying Chan’s exposition of translation as rewriting (as characterised by Andre Lefevere’s manipulation theory) was to construct his own version of Herbert Spencer’s thesis. Yan Fu took a great leap forward by replacing the Confucian ethical code of self-restraint by enlightened self-assertion, and, furthermore, self-cultivation by collective cultivation. In his translation, he does not only reiterate his intention to enhance the race or nation through self-assertion and artificial selection, but also assures his readers that this is a major thesis of Thomas Huxley and Herbert Spencer, which is of course a distortion. Yan Fu’s rhetoric of admiration and idealisation of the West, in particular Britain as the most industrialised nation, rose and eventually waned. It was inflected by his evolutionary perspective and, in the end, underpinned by his fundamental instrumentalism. The ‘code’ that he believed cracked ‘the system’ was of the liberation of energies and capabilities of the individual for the collective good. But while an enormous amount of attention was paid and given to the significance of the individual, individualism and the state as the driving forces of a liberal authored model of modernity, in the end what he posited, and with the greater socio-economic transformative agency, was a designed entity. As Benjamin Schwartz describes of Yan Fu: ‘His more detached eye sees in the modern industrial corporation a triumph both of individual enterprise and of social organization’ (Schwartz 1964, p. 240). So here, if this view is correct, the circle fully turns and in a Nietzschean

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sense ‘the same’ returns. We are back at the beginning with the notion that shaped the agenda of the Self-Strengthening Movement, be it after a long journey across a theoretical and textual landscape. Why was this not self-evident by commentators on Yan Fu? Well, simply because the focus upon culturally significant translation meant the work of missionary tainted journeymen translators was ignored. The spirit of Yan Fu is touched by John Fryer’s. Even more fundamental, and unwittingly, Yan Fu placed himself in a borderland, but not akin to a contemporary strategy (to create a critical assemblage of pre-colonial indigenous knowledge and Western metaphysics that resulted in futural forms of difference). Rather because what he wanted was for China to emulate and outstrip the West, having appropriated the means to do so from it, be it with the aid of a certain reconfigured Confucian ethical and qualitative contribution, but with a great deal of the Confucian tradition that obstructed modernity purged. His interest in history was thus very selective: he wished to appropriate that which succeeded and erase the residual agency of that which obstructed progress (here it is not hard to see why Yan Fu was admired by Mao Zedong). But he failed. Yan Fu did became famous but not for what he tried to do politically, not for the realisation of his dream, but for his literary prowess and as a translator. One can speculate that the bitterness that was reportedly evident in his persona at the end of his life was because he knew his success was completely shallow. In a letter published two years after his death in 1921, when he was 67 years old, he wrote, ‘I cannot look at the books on history and philosophy of which I was formerly so fond and do not care to talk of current affairs. I lie here like a dry stick and cold ashes, all but dead’ (Chan 2003, p. 100).

Concluding comment The history and issues touched on, and complexities of translation in relation to modernity in China, together with the work of John Fryer and Yan Fu, fall into an abyss. No matter from where in the world one views ‘China’ there is so much to understand, and so much forgotten and overlooked. The account given here is obviously partial and preliminary, yet it claims to have realised a significant ambition: to have communicated the value of commencing a situated opening of ‘border thinking’ by China that brings design into the picture. By implication this means first recognising that the complexity outlined cannot be rendered legible by an epistemology (either in general or from any particular culture). What is demanded is a work of understanding. Second, what has been said means that the hermeneutical task that has to be brought to the complexity has to take design seriously and realise there is no adequate understanding without it. Design, so framed, means the prefiguration and ontological transformation of the material and immaterial worlds of human occupation. ‘Things’, not mere objects, have ongoing consequences as assemblies, be they environments, industries, institutions or discourses. They are designing forces that transform human beings directly and

34 Tony Fry

indirectly via constituting conditions of being. In this respect the life of things have an impact on our lives. Subjects formed in part through their encounter with things and their assemblies, as indicated, are thus part of the created and creators. What this means is that our being and the being of things are totally implicated in each other. It follows that in making or unmaking a world we are equally making or unmaking our selves. This process can be seen in the account given of China. But more than this, it also exposes it as a borderland in which we and things meet, that put the question of design firmly in the space of border thinking. The promise of this thinking is that it cracks open received histories while being futurally and politically directive of thinking embedded in making things. What our account has sought to show are various examples of the unconscious enactment of this thesis in order to bring the conscious version (ontological design) to presence.

Notes 1 A review by Dr Alexander Macfie of the writing on history by Keith Jenkins which surveys the positions of many historians, makes this turmoil very clear, see Keith Jenkins Restrospective (review no. 1260), www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/1266 (accessed 30 May 2013). 2 The Chinese resisted keeping to the terms of the Treaty of Nanking, and victimised merchants who did. To counter this the British allowed friendly Chinese vessels to sail under a British flag. However, in 1856 the Chinese authorities in Canton seized the Arrow – a ship claimed to have engaged in piracy that had formerly been registered as a British ship, still flying the British flag, and under command of a British Captain. The British demanded the release of the crew and a formal apology for insulting the British flag. The result: the crew was released, but without an apology. The British Governor in Hong Kong then ordered warships to bombard Canton (an act that was in breach of international law). Notwithstanding, the British Prime Minister, Palmerston, supported the Governor’s actions, not least because he wanted to force the Chinese into even more favourable trade relations with Britain. The French were also keen to join the British in hostilities – this to avenge a murdered missionary and to increase their own trade advantages. On the first and second Opium Wars see especially, Beeching, J. 1975, The Chinese Opium Wars, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, NY. 3 Thomas L. Kennedy comments on a number of these reports (Kennedy 1978). 4 All land was to be divided among the families of the Taiping and their supporters according to family size, with men and women receiving equal shares. After keeping the produce they needed for their own sustenance, each family would place the rest in common granaries (Spence 1990, p. 175). 5 Marx wrote 17 articles on China between June 1953 and February 1860 that were published in the New York Daily Tribune. These were published as a collection – Marx on China, 1853–1860 with an introduction and notes by Dona Toor (Marsh 1951). 6 The Kiangnan Arsenal was established by Li Hung-chang and Tseng Kuo-fan to be more than just a factory making weapons and ammunition; it also housed three other elements that supported its operation as a locus of knowledge transfer, translation and application. These were: a training school for skilling workers set up in 1867; a translation department, also established in 1867; and a school for training translators and linguists that arrived in the following year. These activities were supported by the hiring of foreign experts and by the purchase of machinery from Europe and the United States of America. 7 For instance, out-dated Remington rifles were produced in 1881 and these were rejected for use by troops under the command of the Northern Commissioner. A decade later a

China vs China: conflict and translation 35

8 9

10 11

12 13

14

15 16

17 18 19

modern centre-fire Remington was produced, but it was badly made and when fired it emitted a breech blast. As a result only 2,000-3,000 of the 15,000 manufactured were issued into service (Kennedy 1978, p. 109). The early history of translation is outlined by Weihe Zhong (2003). John Fryer, an Englishman and the son of a Protestant minister, was born in Hythe, Kent. He trained as a teacher at Highbury Training College, London and after his graduation in 1860 took up a teaching position in Hong Kong. Three years later he moved to Peking and then in 1865 he moved to Shanghai, where he continued his teaching career (teaching English), by which time he was fluent in Mandarin. During this period he took over the editorship of the Chiao-hui hsin-pao (Mission News). Although having a proximity to missionary work he was never a full-blown missionary. Adrian Bennett’s essay argued that gaining this knowledge would ‘better prepare China to deal with Western Powers’ (Bennett 1967, p. 46). As Adrian Bennett pointed out, this is clear from his letters to his father and from the documentation of his extra-curricular occupations. He viewed China as a place in which he could ‘make a mark’ (as an ambassador for the West, science and technology) and for this reason he treated his work as a translator as a mission – this to ‘awaken China’ and bring it Western knowledge, Christian civilisation and the modern (Bennett 1967, p. 24). Fifty-one books were published in this series. This was a non-profit enterprise that by 1888 had 650 Western translated titles listed (44 by Fryer – 28 of which were Kiangnan publication) and 228 original Chinese titles. The Depot had branches in Tientsin, Hangchow, Swatow, Peking, Foochow and Hong Kong. The significance of metallurgy was registered by Joseph Needham in his Newcomen Society Lecture, ‘The Development of Iron and Steel Technology in China’, The Science Museum, 1958. The full account was given in Needham’s massive project of Science and Civilisation in China Volume 5, Chemistry and Chemical Technology, Part II: Ferrous Metallurgy (Wagner 2008). Benjamin Schwartz adds a footnote that qualifies this statement; and, different transliterations of Chinese result in varied spelling. In this context Benjamin Schwartz spells Yan (the now common spelling) with ‘e’. Hirano Kenichiro, ‘Professor Benjamin Schwartz’s Influence on the Studies of Yan Fu in Japan’ (with listing of the 97 selected works on Yan Fu in Japan), presented as a conference paper commemorating the 90th anniversary of the birth of Benjamin Schwartz, East China Normal University, 16–18 December 2006. See the review of Huang’s book by Philip Kuhn in the Journal of Chinese Studies, vol. 49, 2009, pp. 519–523. Edward Jecks, History of Politics (1904); Montesquieu, De I’Esprit des Lois (1904–1909); William Stanley Jevons, Logic (1909). See Elsie Kit Ying Chan (2003) note 83: trans. Yan Fu Tianyanlun, pp. 42–43. Spencer’s System of Synthetic Philosophy consists of five books in ten volumes: Book 1 First Principles; Book 2 The Principles of Biology I, II; Book 3 The Principles of Morality I, II (Spencer 1883). Note 84: Schwartz is hinting the same when he states that Yan Fu found Herbert Spencer explaining scientific disciplines in terms of large philosophical principles and placing them within an overall grandiose scheme in which each is assigned its proper place (Schwartz 1964, p. 36).

References Appiah, A. 1985, ‘The uncompleted argument: Du Bois and the illusion of race’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 12, no. 1, p. 29. Beeching, J. 1978, The Chinese Opium Wars, Harcourt Brace Jonanovich, New York.

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Bennett, A. A. 1967, John Fryer: The Introduction of Western Science and Technology into Nineteenth Century China, EARC/Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Chan, E. K. Y. 2003, Translation as Metaphor: Yan Fu and His Translation Principles, PhD thesis, University of Warwick. Chesneaux, J., Bastid, M. and Bergere, M. C. 1977, China and the Opium Wars, trans. A. Destenay, Harvester Press, Hassocks. Elman, B. 2001, review of M. Lackner, I. Ameling and J. Kurtz, New Terms, New Ideas, E. J. Brill, Leiden. Franz, M. and Chang, C. 1966, The Taiping Rebellion: History and Documents, The University of Washington Press, Seattle, WA. Huang, M. K. 2008, The Meaning of Freedom: Yan Fu and the Origins of Chinese Liberalism, Chinese University Press, Hong Kong. Jullien, F. 2004, A Treatise on Efficacy, trans. Y. Lloyd, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, HI. Kennedy, T. L. 1978, The Arms of Kiangnan, Westview Press, Bolder, CO. Lefevere, A. 1992, Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literay Frame, Routledge, London. Lone, S. 1994, Japan’s First Modern War, St Martins Press, New York. Marsh, D. B. 1951, Marx on China, 1853–1860: Articles from the New York Daily Tribune. With an introduction and notes by Dona Toor, Lawrence and Wishart, London. Mignolo, W. 2000, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledge, and Border Thinking, Princeton University Press, NJ. Mignolo, W. 2011, The Darker Side of Western Modernity, Duke University Press, NC. Schwartz, B. 1964, In Search of Wealth and Power: Yen Fu and the West, Belknap/Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Smith, A., Dugald S. and Garnier M. G. 1825, The Wealth of Nations, BiblioBytes. Spence, J. D. 1969, To Change China: Western Advisers in China 1620–1960, Little, Brown, Boston, MA. Spence, J. D. 1990, The Search for Modern China, W. W. Norton, New York. Spencer, H. 1883, System of Synthetic Philosophy, D. Appleton and Company, New York. Teng, S. Y. 1971, The Taiping Rebellion and the Western Powers, Clarendon Press, Oxford. Toor, D. (ed.) 1951, Marx on China 1853–1860, Lawrence and Wishart, London. Wagner, D. 2008, Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 5, Chemistry and Chemical Technology, Part II: Ferrous Metallurgy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Wood, F. 1995, Did Marco Polo Go to China? Secker and Warburg, London. Zhong, W. 2003, ‘An Overview of Translation in China’, Translation Journal, vol. 7, no. 2, p. 7.

2 BACK TO THE THIRD WORLD The Greek experience Eleni Kalantidou

In defining Greece and its characteristics one cannot start by describing one nation, one language, one religion, one set of moral values. Indisputably it has always been in a position of betweenness, surrounded by visible and invisible borders constantly changing, by lines ostensibly dictating place and ethos that were repeatedly and persistently overlapped, as ‘living on the borderland corresponds with being aware of the existence of the multiplicity of borders and often with almost constant need to cross them’ (Balibar cited in Sadowski 2009, p. 83). Greece’s following description, through historical and sociopolitical events, and the complementary analysis and interpretation, does not aim to present simply a historical review but a characterisation of a historical process that designed the contemporary existence of ‘Hellenes’. Their purpose is to uncover hidden pieces of history that have been neglected and overseen as uninteresting and unimportant outside the borders of a marginalised country, and which surprisingly enough, lie in the ‘unconscious Greek mind’, made up of suppressed and forgotten memories as to survive defeat, despair and humiliation. So what has been left out deliberately, unintentionally or due to lack of care from the historical knowledge of Greece, has enhanced its historical ‘mythology’ colourfully described in Henry Miller’s (1942) travel book The Colossus of Maroussi, where the author presented his perception of Greece based on his correspondence with Lawrence Durrell and his own personal experience of the place: I had been receiving letters from Greece from my friend Lawrence Durrell … His letters were marvelous too, and yet a bit unreal to me. Durrell is a poet and his letters were poetic: they caused certain confusion in me owing to the fact that the dream and the reality, the historical and the mythological, were so artfully blended. Later I was to discover for myself that this confusion is real and not due entirely to the poetic faculty. (Miller 1942, p. 2)

38 Eleni Kalantidou

The road to modernity: assembling the cultural hybrid of Greece Demarcated by its geography as positioned on the edge of Europe, Asia and Africa, Greece never stopped being a cartographical puzzle and cultural conundrum throughout its known history. Its intermediateness is exhibited via a vast number of examples demonstrating the lack of true and overt boundaries. Alone in the late nineteenth century, Greeks were enlightening fellow Christian Orthodox Balkan populations on literature written in Greek while they were fighting Serbs and Bulgarians over lands and minority rights (Kitromilides 1989). Being part of the Ottoman Empire, and yet Europeans and Byzantines, they tried hard to denounce the Orient influence of Turks and at the same time pressed ‘for the aggrandizement of the fledgling state to encompass all the Eastern lands inhabited by Greeks in a reconstituted Byzantine Empire’ (Peckham 2000, p. 1). Even in the twenty-first century, in the era of supranational borders and the disassembling of purely national jurisdictions, Greece’s locus is both central and marginal, part of the European Union and concurrently peripheral, and as such ‘weakened and separated from the borderline (the monetary independence or the fiscal control)’ (Balibar 2009, p. 193). In the turbulent history of its culture, politics and economy (despite methodological disagreements and constantly changing borders of the subject matter), exogenous influences, populations’ heterogeneity and imposed intellectual schemata all played a crucial determinate role in the creation of modern Greece. More importantly, the rational construct of the Greek nation is a two-centuries-old product of the efforts of Greek diaspora, indigenous and foreign, political and intellectual forces that jointly imposed a consciousness of unified entity on Greeks located in regions with different local traditions and self-sustainment rules.1 In attempting to recapture the foreign influences resulting from conquests and occupations that Greek regions suffered, from the dominance of the Roman Empire and Byzantium until the first half of the twentieth century, one would have to cite a long list of ethnic groups that settled and reigned over the indigenous populations.2 Nonetheless, the strongest influence, culturally and socially, that Greece ever experienced by foreign conquistadors came after the fall of Constantinople (1453AD) when the former Byzantine province was subordinated to the Ottoman Empire and stayed under the ‘barbarian yoke’ for almost four centuries until the revolution of independence (1821AD). Throughout the long period of living under the Turkish rule, Greeks succeeded in keeping alive what was developed during the Byzantine years as a cultural and spiritual tradition, mostly because of the Quran’s tolerance towards the religions of the subjugated (Christians, Jews). What was not expected was the shift of Greek people towards their glorious past after disclaiming it as pagan and incompatible with their Christian faith, acquired during the Byzantine period. Re-establishing a connection with their Hellenic inheritance was the only way, especially for the dethroned Byzantine elite (phanariots3) who did not want to have any connections

Back to the Third World: the Greek experience 39

to the barbarian Turks or the schismatic Christian West in order to maintain a certain identity, historically and religiously. The re-attachment to ancient Greece’s ideals did not bring any changes to the oppressed rural and communal lifestyle of indigenous Greek populations. It did however make them willing to acknowledge themselves as the continuance of the ancient Hellenes, an idea projected at them by the Renaissance European thought of the seventeenth century. A powerful Greek community spread in Western Europe (merchants) and located in Constantinople (phanariots) initiated the outstanding task of destabilising the blind faith of enslaved Greeks to Christian values and replacing them with the Hellenic rationale, arising from Ancient Greece. To attain this goal, they designed the educational programme of schools in the Greek province based on the philosophical and scientific teachings of the University of Padua (from which most of them had graduated) (Campbell and Sherrard 1969). A ‘proper education’ would bring back the light to a Greece covered in ‘darkness’ (Drummond 1754). That was how Europe perceived Greece in 1754, viewing it as a shameful shadow disconnected from its cultural heritage. And the bearers of the modern thought blamed the Ottoman Empire for the diminished ‘Greek character’, seen not least with the uneducated peasant’s personality that had none of the attributes of ancient Greeks, only the language. The only escapees from Greece’s scotadism were ‘the scholars cognizant of republicanism, and merchants partaking in capitalist enterprises, who could not accept their lot’ (Jusdanis 2001, p. 118). This is a critical point in the Hellenic modern history because that is exactly when the enlightened Greeks of the West, the ‘moderns’, decided to categorise self-managed societies of Greek regions and their rituals and traditions as ‘backward’ and unprogressive. Overwhelmed by this shameful admittance, Greek intellectuals of diaspora focused on appropriating the language of education and literature in order to promulgate a resurgence of the culture. For them, the desired cultural enhancement and revival could be achieved only by promoting a language that could be graspable by provincial Greeks and that could be disseminated by an enlightened proselytising intelligentsia. Moreover, the fixed determination of the cultural critics to build a new Hellenic cultural identity grounded on the Western ideals led them to also pursue political regeneration so as to prompt the process of re-civilising Greece (Kitromilides 1994). The politicisation of culture was related to the interconnection between the linguistic and ethnic survival of Greeks who, even as part of the Ottoman Empire and under the universalism of Orthodoxy, still comprised a different nation, holding a distinctive past and future. Based on these facts, the intellectuals, with the support of merchants and phanariots, stated the necessity, with no further delay, of establishing an independent nation-state as a perquisite for the construction of a society closer to the European model (Jusdanis 2001), to the ‘modern’, this defined by Michel Foucault as a mode of relating to contemporary reality; a voluntary choice made by certain people; in the end, a way of thinking and feeling; a way, too, of acting

40 Eleni Kalantidou

and behaving that at one and the same time marks a relation of belonging and presents itself as a task. A bit, no doubt, like what the Greeks called an ethos. (Foucault 1984, p. 39, italics added) In the case of Greece the ethos was borrowed, or copied, it did not originate from the hardship and the Greek ‘character’ of the peasant chieftains, the local authorities (clergy, mukhtar4), the islanders, the inhabitants of the Greek eparchy who fought the war of liberation and who did not have in mind a European nation-state, but actually a unity of self-managed communities, freed from foreign dependence or ruling. As a consequence of the aforementioned intentions, during the war of independence (1821–1832) Greece willingly took its first loan (1824), and after the war’s end and the liberation of a small portion of its occupied lands it uncomplainingly received in return a German king (1832) (Campbell and Sherrard 1969), became divided into three political territories following respectively the commands of England, Russia and France, and got sidetracked by the Great Idea5 of liberating unreleased Greek territories in pursuit of Panhellenic union, this so as to ‘divert domestic discontent towards external aspirations’ (Kitromilides 1994, p. 168) and avoid confrontation with the real problems. These included a bleeding economy, an uncontrollable bureaucracy, disorderly urbanisation and a lack of foundations to support capitalism and modernity. From this point on the history repeats itself: wars enhanced the state’s disorganisation, national dichasm aggravated social and political problems, and bankruptcies and financial dead-ends sustained Greece’s dependence on foreign banks and forces. In other words, the hybrid form of the Greek nation formally following the leads of its paternal European figures and informally defined by its Eastern influences, its ancient heritage and its Christian traditions, created an ethnos of unbalance and weakness trapped in its disposition of tardiness and marked by losses and failures. As Peter Bien eloquently phrased it: Such more or less, was the first form of invented Greek nationality – the initial version if you will, of the myth, that displacing the Christian world-view provided at the deepest level a metaphysical rationale for life and death: a meaning for what would otherwise be a futile, meaningless existence. No matter that it was a double distortion: a distortion of ancient Greek reality, and a distortion as well of modern Greek reality. (Bien 2005, p. 226) To the greatest extent, the relationship between modern and ancient Greece and Greece’s captivation with Europe and modernity are all topics as alive today as they were when the transmission of Western ideas and practices began. In this unchanged context, Greeks never managed to clearly perceive the lure of the superior West and the entrapment in their imposed marginality.

Back to the Third World: the Greek experience 41

From society-based communities to the ‘modern Greek self’: the psychosocial construction of Western Hellenes For the native, objectivity is always directed against him. (Fanon 1963, p. 77) Identity for Greeks was never an issue before modernity arrived, probably for this was the exact moment when their identity became erased. In their pre-modern days, they always had Ariadne’s thread to keep them united under any circumstances, even in times when this identity was something undefined and unspecified, difficult to maintain in its vagueness. Indisputably, it was either the Greek Orthodox Church or the golden era of Greek antiquity that gave them something to hold onto while being enslaved by different rulers and divided into different geopolitical zones. But the efficiency of this ‘identity’ generated by a common faith, a community life, directed by the local clergy and a confused reminiscence of the glorious descendants (‘Hellenes’), was traumatised through the process of turning Greece into a modern nation-state. The course of forming a small nation-state based on the European model inevitably altered non-Western Greeks’ perception of governance, religion, politics, society and themselves. Notwithstanding the Greekness of the new era architects, their efforts were oriented towards the West and the Modern, progress and Enlightenment. These men, mostly bourgeois of the diaspora along with their Russian, British or French allies, were eager to create a new identity for the people of the infant nation-state by denouncing any connection with its Oriental self. In order to do so, three things had to be streamlined: the Greek Orthodox Church, education and polity. Reforming the Greek Orthodox Church was one of the foremost steps towards moving away from Greece’s Ottoman past and its Oriental influences. Adamantios Korais (cited in Frazee 1969, p. 102), a significant intellectual of the Greek diaspora, critically remarked that ‘from this hour the clergy of the liberated parts of Greece no longer owe recognition to the ecclesiastical authority of the patriarch of Constantinople who remains contaminated under the throne of a lawless tyrant’. Creating the autocephalous Greek Orthodox Church of Greece (July 1833) meant its estrangement from the pre-modern Constantinople Patriarchate and its connections with the Ottoman state. It additionally signified its modification into ‘a secular doctrine and certainly one at odds with its own deposit of faith’ (Martin 1978, p. 272). The goal of Georg von Maurer, a German Protestant and member of King Otto’s regency responsible for issues of the Greek Orthodox Church, education and justice was to turn the Greek Orthodox Church into an extension of the state (Frazee 1969, p. 114), bare from any true jurisdiction over its people, and mostly to detach the Greek Orthodox Church from any foreign centres of decision making. The nationalisation of the Greek Orthodox Church by its subordination to the state was the first step towards weakening the relationship between the Greek Orthodox flock and the clergy, and eradicating its role in keeping the indigenous Greek culture and traditions alive.

42 Eleni Kalantidou

Thus, the stigma of the Oriental ‘disease’, which infected Greeks while being exposed to the Oriental ways of their oppressors, had to be removed along with any other sign of amalgamation of the existing Greek culture with the Ottoman customs, rituals and values. The strategy of de-Orientalisation also included the obliteration of any sign of intellectual influence coming from the East and the promotion of the ‘superiority’ of Western literature, art and formation of thought through the education of reason. The historians’ tactic was to demonstrate ‘the ethnic integrity and Occidental character of Greek literature’, by positing ‘the Turkish Other in order to promote the vision of Greece’s Western identity’ (Jusdanis 1987, p. 1, original emphasis). Their approach was built upon the cultural devastation of Greece caused by the Turkish occupation, which prevented its participation in the Western Renaissance and its financial and cultural growth, and on the fabricated truth that the East never influenced Greek literature. Greeks were the opposite of Turks and therefore they had to be united with the enlightened Europe: Greece, then, insofar as it produced a literature, had to be European. It was a self-fulfilling argument: the West as the source of civilization is superior to the East, literature and art are the products of the West, Greece possesses a literature, ergo it must be European. (Jusdanis 1987, p. 2) A much more evident method that nurtured Western Greek identity was the design of its educational programme. Elementary schools multiplied with remarkable speed from 1830 to 1879 throughout the free territories of Greece, disseminating linguistic homogeneity, fundamental and practical knowledge. The main purpose of this programme, though, was the establishment of a secondary education, able to train young men to fill middle-skill bureaucratic positions according to the model of the European institutions. The third and most important part of this programme was the founding of a university as the theoretical compass of modernity and nationalism. The realisation of this aspiration in 1837 turned the education of the Greek bourgeois class into an internal affair and established Athens as the centre of Western thought in the Balkans and the Middle East, and its university as the vehicle of Western culture (Kitromilides 1994). Comprehending the Greek educational system requires mentioning the role the Greek bourgeois of the diaspora played as major funders of institutional Greece during the nineteenth century. Unquestionably, their cause was less than noble. They needed human resources to equip their businesses, and trained in the same Western model of education that shaped their own thought and perception of everyday life and professional practice. For this reason, they acted as the state’s benefactors, this for many decades after the establishment of Greek independence, and shaped social networks by influencing politicians, controlling indigenous merchants and setting the Western example for the rural populations (Tsoucalas cited in Mouzelis 1978). Besides indigenous people’s dependent relationship with the clergy and its educational alignment, meaning that for centuries clergymen were the main providers

Back to the Third World: the Greek experience 43

of literacy and consultation for all kinds of issues (political, spiritual, social, economic) for the subjugated periphery, another important aspect of Greek reality that required change was the mode of communicating new state regulations, and their mode of implementation, from the state to its people. During the Ottoman years, the improvised democratic procedures followed by a communal self-government, when landlords and the priesthood were the representatives of their community and the negotiators of their rights with the Turks, and sustained a set of unwritten laws and social unity. This form of social organisation was unaffected by class division because even the powerful landowners were unprotected and feeble in the eyes of the Turkish commanders. Also, a multifaceted arrangement of social obligations and responsibilities developed between them and the peasants forced them to pursue, at least from time to time, better living and taxing conditions for ‘their people’. The conversion of former Ottoman eparchies into a nation-state with a centralised government and bureaucracy where no local voices could be heard had a major impact on their social structure. The New Greek state was represented by officers with no knowledge, personal ties or understanding of the local communities, who imposed the requirements of an alien political and administrative system. As a result, these local communities were allocated to groups and individuals who, in their effort to guard their interests through political mediators, replaced communal camaraderie with clientele relationships. This model of ‘patronage’ was vital for the survival of peasants and their families under the burden of relentless exploitation and extortion coming from the state but inevitably led to the dissolution and fragmentation of indigenous communities (Campbell and Sherrard 1969). Villagers were guided to believe that the chasm between them and the officials, who were neither part of their clan nor their culture, was unbridgeable, mostly because these men adhered to an unfamiliar hierarchical structure and received a Western education. Subsequently, officials had to minimise their cultural dislocation by favouring a kinsman in order to receive, in return, protection of their own interests. Reluctantly, what was gradually lost in this process was the pre-modern self-regulation of the rural communities and an ethnic consciousness, which had remained undiluted for hundreds of years. An opposition against the intellectual and moral dissolvent of the indigenous culture was expressed by the politician and writer Ion Dragoumis, who articulated intense concerns regarding how the nationstate, under the commands of foreign forces and bourgeois directions, tempered the genuineness of ‘Greek identity’. The aspirations of his endeavour have been accurately summarised by Robert Shannan Peckham: He sought to trace the history of this tension between a local consciousness (topikismos[6]), which was traditionally strong in Greece, and the externally directed, state imposed system of government introduced by the Bavarian regent Georg von Maurer in 1834 … For Ion Dragoumis, the state’s efforts to unify the country’s rural populations amounted to a form of cultural, political, and economic colonisation. (Peckham 2000, p. 89, original italics)

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Along with other thoughtful Greek minds, Ion Dragoumis perceived Orientalisation as damaging for the traditions, customs, values, language and artistic expressions of the Greek village people, especially because he detected the vulnerability of a newly built nation not grounded on the existing knowledge, generated from the self-governing practices and ethnic values of indigenous communities, but on the contrary, disoriented by modern principals of revenue and individualism. Strongly connected to their own customs and to a culture based on an intellectual ‘bricolage’7 (Lévi-Strauss 1962, p. 11), were also the indigenous Greek populations living in communities scattered around the Ottoman Empire. These people, a living proof of the ancient Greek colonies (Asia Minor and Pontus region on the southern coast of the Black Sea), exemplified how a common language and religion had produced a homogenised ethnic ‘consciousness’, as they considered themselves to be descendants of the glorious Hellenes and also compatriots of the Greeks living in the premises of the Greek state. The desire of Greek populations inhabiting both ends of the Aegean pelago to be united under one nation-state was expressed through the intellectual context of the ‘Great Idea’. Ioannis Kolettis’ ambitious dream was supported three decades later by an American official, Charles Tuckerman, who defined the Great Idea by stating that the Greek mind is to regenerate the East, that it is the destiny of Hellenism to Hellenize that vast stretch of territory which by natural laws the Greeks believe to be theirs, and which is chiefly inhabited by people claiming to be descended from Hellenic stock, professing the Orthodox or Greek faith, or speaking the language. (Tuckerman cited in Peckham 2000, p. 85) This expression of encouragement was strongly related to the agony of the Greek communities outside Greece’s margins and the ongoing question of ‘where were Greece’s boundaries to be fixed’ (Peckham 2000, p. 9). Nevertheless, it was equally related to Bulgaria’s expansionism and the movement of Panslavism in the Balkans (1870–1880) that urged foreign forces to advocate Greek politicians to pursue the realisation of the Great Idea. For numerous reasons that will not be explored here, the Asia Minor expedition (1919–1922), the biggest military campaign Greece had experienced since the era of Alexander the Great, led to the Asia Minor catastrophe (1922) and to the end of the fantasy of a new ‘Byzantium’. For Nicos Mouzelis (1978) 1922 was the year that defined the history of modern Greece. This military disaster caused the removal of one million people from their homes and their ancestors’ lands and added one million refugees to Greece’s population. These people, devastated by their loss, personified an end, through the stabilisation of the Greek boundaries, and a beginning, by providing the human capital for the industrialisation of Greece and the modernisation of its economy. In addition, populations, mostly from the Pontic region, amplified the ‘Greek element’ in areas threatened by Slavic invasions, by being settled in Northern Greek territories with mixed populations. With their unexpected arrival they urged the

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state to move forward with the division of large areas of land and their distribution to the refugees that enhanced agricultural production, and to accommodate them in urban centres, which created an abundance of cheap labour for industry (Mouzelis 1978). Their impact was strong not only on the economic configuration of the country but also on its political and social construction. Along with the lament for the ‘lost homelands’ (chamenes patrides), these populations brought with them their cultural legacy, a blend of their ancient heritage, their Byzantine faith and their Eastern folk influences, as well a great deal of anger against one of the two parties8 responsible for the Asia Minor disaster. Surprisingly enough, refugees avoided confrontation with the political scene that was responsible for their unsettlement. On the contrary, they followed the example of the rural communities and adopted the clientelistic method in order to pursue social and financial survival. The Greek Orthodox Church – that kept traditions animated and communities united for hundreds of years before the war of independence failed to intervene in both cases – by becoming autocephalous and dependent on the state, was converted into an instrument of Greek nationalism. The successful attempt to diminish the importance of religion in the life of Greeks created as a result its ‘increased politicization by making the Greek Orthodox Church a state institution’ (Stavrakakis 2003, p. 166) that ‘spearheaded all nationalist initiatives in the latter part of the nineteenth and throughout the twentieth century’ (Kitromilides 1989, p. 166). On the same path, education’s role was to disengage all Greeks, including refugees, from their Oriental past and reform them based on the Western model of thought and knowledge, disregarding the indigenous culture and its intellectual products. In tune with the religious and intellectual reform of Greece, the bourgeois turned patron-class willingly adopted the role of the political actor, the mediator and executor of the modernisation of Greece by supporting a hierarchical society where personal relations were dominant. One hundred years after the revolution, the liquidity of the political and social conditions of the New Greek nation-state revealed a glimpse of its fate; political stability and modernity would never arrive. What followed the ‘secularisation’ of the Greek Orthodox Church and the Westernisation of the state was not the creation of yet another modern nation-state. Regrettably, dominated classes (rural populations, immigrants) failed to develop a condition of class politics and leave behind patronage methods, and continued to support the dominant class (bourgeoisie) by remaining entangled in its clientelistic networks as the feeders, via their vote and support, of an obscure political system (Mouzelis 1978). Political instability in the second half of the twentieth century took the form of monarchy, democratic governance, dictatorship (1967–1974) and re-establishment of the Hellenic Republic (1974), and was socially expressed through social division, generated by the aftermath of the Asia Minor disaster, that led to a number of political mayhems including the 4th of August Regime (1936–1941)9 and a civil war10 (1946–1949) from which many generations of Greeks struggled to recover. As Adamantia Pollis (1965, p. 36) efficaciously identified, ‘the specific factors that account for political

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instability in Greece is the problem of reconciling a group-oriented society, lacking the concept of an autonomous individual, to a democratic polity predicated on this very concept’. In detail, the failure to create the ‘autonomous individual’ based on the enlightened ideas of freedom again originated in the 1830s, when the underlying indigenous patterns of social behaviour were completely disregarded by the first official state. The master plan of transplanting imported ideas and rationalising individuals according to the bourgeois logic failed miserably because it was forced upon utterly ‘irrational’ populations in regards to its criteria. In that case, rationality, as described by Jürgen Habermas et al. (1964), was the pursuit of general interest by bourgeois individuals as a public body that directly addressed these issues to the state and was viable only in conditions of free market, private spheres and minimum state intervention. In Greece, a newly established country with a pre-modern culture, Western norms and cognitive schemata such as privacy, rights, law and state were translated through people’s experiences, their non-market economic relations and their set of unwritten rules. In a society faced with ‘everyday situations like owing and repaying someone a favour, using one’s influence to help a friend or to take revenge on a foe, demanding assistance from one’s neighbour or preferring to lose money rather than to lose face’ (Tsoucalas 1991, p. 12), fullstrength individualism and reification of behavioural norms were concepts that could never be adopted, let alone modify a model of reciprocal exchange based on moral values. As stated by Constantinos Tsoucalas (1991, p. 14) in the case of Greek populations ‘the internalization of the individuals’ claims and responsibilities follows a hierarchically organized system of reciprocal “bonds” stretching from the nuclear family to the extended kin or clan, the local village community, the region, and finally to the genos’. For a non-industrialised, non-stratified and non-political society, untouched by the preaching of modernity, it was unthinkable to denounce the amateur and impromptu political and economic practices that helped them sustain a certain culture and manage their food production, education, rituals and civil rights for hundreds of years. Despite the imported need for clear distinctions between selfregulation and authority, all transactions – psychosocial and economical – derived from personal relationships intertwined with authoritarian forms. In the dawn of the new state, there was no social mechanism to promote common interest or to restrict the application of an authoritative allocation system. Hence, the only form of transaction between the free market, the state and the Greek ‘character’ that could take place was political clientelism or patronage. Alex Weingrod (1968, p. 381) proclaimed that ‘patron–client ties can be seen to arise within a state structure in which authority is dispersed and state activity limited in scope, and in which considerable separation exists between the levels of village, city and state’. Because of this particular situation, a hybrid of new and old practical reason was developed, distant from the liberal self-evident pre-eminence of the individual, the establishment of rights and the freedom to demand them but

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also disengaged from the small-scale politics of the indigenous communities. The social claims expressed through the landlords during the Ottoman years and turned into unofficial rights claimed by the new breed of patrons (lawyers, politicians), were still supplementary to an ethical dimension of responsibility towards a certain social group and not towards the vindication of general interest. Hence, this ‘ethical’ dimension legitimised actions of ‘corruption’ under the rubric of reciprocal solidarity’s obligations and Machiavellian – the ends justify the means – practices. Ironically, ‘corruption’ as the main aspect of clientelism turned out to be the only tactic that could sustain a social structure built on personal relations and simultaneously provide the ground for ‘modernisation’ to grow. On the whole, Greeks in the spring of modernisation identified themselves through political groups and their needs were covered via mediating personas. Their self-perception was the product of characteristics generated by the group/s that they belonged to and shared reciprocal support with. All social groups created through this process were nothing more than clientelistic networks nourishing subjective causes. Furthermore, patronage schemata were greatly connected to a thriving political nepotism that started blooming from the early years of the Greek nation-state and hasn’t stopped since. The higher ranks of the Greek political life, that traditionally supervised and implicitly controlled the clientelistic networks, were always dominated by members of families with long traditions in the governmental history of the country. This odd fragmentation of the Greek society prevented it from developing a communal behaviour outside of personalised spheres of influence, and disoriented individuals from directly looking after their own self-interest. And, since both material interests and symbolic powers pursued by persons, factions, families, and even wider groups were inevitably immersed in everyday political issues, it would be extraordinary if the promotion of these conflicting ‘interests’ were expressed through the ‘irrelevant’ questions of ethics, technology, science, or economic theory. (Tsoucalas 1991, p. 19) Continuing the examination of the transformation of indigenous Greeks into moderns, it is crucial to explore the qualities of the modern Greek self and how these characteristics differed from or resembled the Western ones. In modern societies self-worth is related to self-judgement and self-reflection, and people inflict guilt upon themselves even if their objectionable actions have a negative impact on others. In the Greek case, self-worth is estimated regarding the success of accomplishing certain obligations connected to the claims and demands of a personalised network. If people fail to do so, they do not experience individual guilt as a product of internalised values, but shame; a psychological mechanism triggered by not honouring the set of values imposed by their social, professional or political network. Accordingly, they will be held to account for their actions in front of their peers and shame will be their psychological punishment.

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The disparities between guilt and shame were addressed by early theorists (Ausubel, Benedict, Freud cited in Tangney 1990), who centred their research activities around the private–public and internal–external scopes. These theorists concluded that guilt is generated by self-perception of inappropriate actions or violation of moral codes and is a private matter, and shame is a responsive emotion to public disapproval. They also concluded that extensive collective variables could direct people to embrace shame or guilt as well as that cultures are divided based on the attribute they adopt (Tangney 1990). Another noteworthy aspect of guilt is its connotation in Greek, as the term guilt (enochi) is perceived and utilised as a legal term and shame (ntropi) is not hermeneutically associated with guilt. The differentiation between the self-inflicted and community-oriented emotions of moral responsibility does not define only the connection of individuals with their society and themselves. Modern individuals bear the burden of consciousness because they are uninhibited about defining their actions and take responsibility for them, whereas modern Greek individuals are allowed to transgress any of the rules without being held responsible for them if their actions are an exhibition of commitment to their camaraderie group. Under this rubric of social relationships they do not feel obligated to decide for themselves or take accountability for their doings. In the same manner, Greek professionals are successful only if they are recognised to be as such by their personalised network. It is not connected to self-accomplishment or to a string of ethical rules as it is in Western societies. The uniqueness of the Greek character regarding shame (ntropi) is embedded in interdependence within a specific and restricted social frame, which defines ‘standing in the world’ and generates values such as philotimo (love of honour), which doesn’t have an equivalent word in English (Pollis 1965). John Adamopoulos (1977, p. 313) noted that ‘the concept has been described as a regulator of ingroup behavior, thus associating individuals with their social environment’ and borrowed the translation of Dorothy Lee (1959) who identified philotimo as ‘self esteem’. These attributes of the Greek character were the ones that created a certain relationship with authority and directed Greeks’ involvement or lack of it in the polity. Greekness defined the relationship between people and the Private, the State and Civil Society by overshadowing it or detouring it. Institutions and neutral bureaucracy could never find their place in the Greek society so long as people’s political identity was connected to an unofficial system of negotiations, obligations and promises. For this reason civil society, understood as the institutions and mores of social conduct, was never present in the way it was and still is perceived in Western societies; in Greece ‘society is organised towards a pinnacle, with vertical linkages, but it lacks the horizontal connections that would provide a sound base’ (Legg and Roberts 1997, p. 200). In detail, the appropriation of modernity within the context of clientelism was achieved under conditions where political parties and politicians were pursuing their own ambitions hidden behind political debate that mostly focused on vacuous idealisms and abstract concepts such as freedom and democracy, or personal exchanges of accusations, irrelevant to the circumstances of everyday life. The lack of a political agenda oriented towards

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the financial development and independence of the country led, at least until the second half of the twentieth century, to a Greek economy grounded on borrowed funds and directed to non-manufacturing sectors, with its capital being exported to foreign banks or invested in shipping (Mouzelis 1978). This helps explain why Greece never became an industrialised country following the Western European model. Despite the fact that it entered modernity late and that it exhibited many characteristics of a semi-colonised country (loans from foreign forces, controlled political system and imposed education), its social formation and the sovereignty of the patronage system never allowed the state to step away from a simple commodity production (agriculture, ‘small’ industry) by keeping it viable and at the same time undeveloped, this via hundreds of small family artisanships. The weakness of the political system to survive without a clientelistic network of economic ‘transactions’ disadvantaged the adoption of the modern practice of either destroying small businesses or integrating them into the production system as part of a bigger industry. Against this backdrop, the ‘enclave’ scheme of Greek industrialisation created a condition of intense profit for the capitalists, but with a minimum distribution of the capital goods. This caused social and financial disparities expressed, especially after the Second World War, through political mobilisation and social upheavals. The abandonment of rural Greece by the State and the wealth accumulation in the irregularly developing urban centres enhanced the phenomenon of rural exodus (astiphilia) by compelling hundreds of thousands of people to move from their villages to the capital and the co-capital (Athens and Thessaloniki respectively) or to emigrate to Western Europe in order to find temporary or poorly paid employment. Again, family – the nucleus of the Greek society – saved the day by having a vast number of Gastarbeiters sending money to their home villages and towns, supporting relatives they left behind and giving a boost to the Greek economy by improving the unemployment rate. The side effects of emigration were seen in the dissatisfaction and restlessness of people that got separated from their loved ones and in people who were struggling to survive in the big cities. In the two decades following the liberation of Greece from German occupation (1944–1964) the social discontent towards the division between the urban and rural Greece, the privileged and the disadvantaged, the ones who stayed and the ones who had to emigrate, brought alterations to the patronage networks and a rise of social demands coming from the dominated classes. The Right patronage who regulated the Greek country after the end of the civil war in 1949 started progressively to lose ground and people all over Greece shifted from being self-aware of the lack of resources to self-deceptive, thinking that they could have a piece of what the bourgeois class already had been enjoying, bedazzled by the ‘phantasmagoria’ (Benjamin 1999). Thirty years after the 1930s when Walter Benjamin (1999) acknowledged the illusionary and seductive character of the Paris Arcades of the nineteenth century, rural people who moved to the big urban centres were experiencing the same emotion generated by the capitalist ‘dream’. Greece’s unexpected popularity as a tourist destination and consumption’s little helpers, magazines and

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television advertisements assisted the rise of the capitalism in the mid-1960s. With a slight delay, Greeks were ready to start shifting from their semi-traditional ways of perceiving themselves and others through ‘love of honour’ (philotimo) to an exceptional version of individualism, one still connected to clientelism but disconnected from the unpleasant feeling of shame. In pursuit of the capitalist dream Greek society became more fragmented, opportunistic and distant from claiming the common interest (Mouzelis 1978). Political hindrances such as the Greek coup d’état (1967) and seven years of dictatorship (1967–1973) empowered Greeks’ ambition to become like their free, sophisticated and well-off ‘distant relatives’, the Western Europeans. And their wish came true via the integration of Greece into the European Economic Community (1981), its membership of the European Union (1993), and the adoption of the Euro (2002).11 For 25 years they celebrated the rise of the middle class, the influx of Western commodities, the pursuit of the Westerly defined ‘well-being’, and negated everything that resembled their embarrassing past, Balkan, migrant or Ottoman. Nevertheless, by ignoring the political corruption, the excessive self-indulgence and the pitfalls of the ‘dreamlike’ modern life, their consent to ‘a social construction of problems in “individualist” terms kept fragmentation in social protection high and supported a social exclusion risk-profile based on differential access to political credentials allowing individuals, households and enterprises to benefit from the rent-yielding state mechanisms’ (Petmesidou 2011, p. 225). During the 1990s and early 2000s and while Greeks were enjoying the raised living standards, they were becoming more and more entangled in a credit-driven real-estate boom. In the same period of time, the clientelistic foundations of the political regimes did not allow the State to confront the stark restraints of its development model and its narrowing financial basis, placed on an unequal, to its production and exports, consumption and on prolonged over-borrowing. As was foreseen but not prevented, the artificial Westernisation ended abruptly with ‘the burst of the construction bubble, the collapse of the credit-financed demand, the intensification of sovereign debt crisis and the austerity packages’ (Petmesidou 2011, p. 226) that followed the era of profusion. Greeks went from being modern back to being again the semicolonised periphery, the carriers of the ‘Greek character’, the ‘Third World’. What was lost in the process, was their pre-modern self; the past had to be destroyed in order for their modern self to arise from the confusion generated by the ‘constraints of rationality combined with the needs of their society’ (Latour 1993, p. 130).

A ‘Hellene of the world’ – designing globalised Greece Free yourself from one passion to be dominated by another and nobler one. But is not that, too, a form of slavery? To sacrifice oneself to an idea, to a race, to God? Or does it mean that the higher the model the longer the tether of our slavery? (Kazantzakis 1952, pp. 26–27)

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When visiting contemporary Greece the twists and turns of history, the appropriations and replicas of the modern, are instantly obvious as is the absence of the pre-Western. The pre-modern Greek self, who had been sung and narrated by generation after generation for hundreds of years, doesn’t really exist anymore. It is predominantly untraceable in the concrete urbanised environments and the abandoned villages; it is remarkably unnoticeable in the appearance, behaviour, domestic and physical environment of the New Greeks. The past faded away at a steady pace while they were pursuing a ‘liberated’ future. Perhaps unintentionally, the detachment from the pre-modern lifestyle of the Greek periphery first started when it was communicated to the rest of the world and mostly to the aristocratic cycles of Western Europe, through the writings of the philhellenic European travellers in the revolutionary Greek periphery in the nineteenth century, the romantic poems of Lord Byron and from paintings, such as The Massacre of Chios by the French artist Eugène Delacroix (1824), repeatedly depicting folkloric representations of rural life and moments of either victorious grandeur or devastating defeat. While the Western bourgeois classes were expressing sympathy for a distressed semi-barbaric population with a glorious heritage as described in the previous part of the chapter, Greeks were struggling to disengage themselves from their traditional ways, bewildered by the superiority of the ‘enlightened European’. For instance, the first foreign loan (1824), signed by the Greeks and British bankers for the noble cause of the revolution, was squandered in order to serve the needs of the war-chiefs and captains to turn themselves from uncivilised rebels to Western officials. As accurately described by John Campbell and Philip Sherrard (1969) ‘phanariots and the professional men exchanged their rags for new suits and the soldiers suddenly appeared with gilded yataghans and silver mounted pistols’ (Campbell and Sherrard 1969, p. 70). Shortly after its liberation, Greece was swept away by the idealised sophistication of Western design and rushed into mimicking the superior paradigm. This process was officially inaugurated with Greece’s participation in the Great Exhibition of 1851, in London. For the newborn nation-state it was an opportunity to seize momentum provided by the widespread recognition of its victory against the Orient tyrant and to present itself as a national entity in front of its European ‘saviours’. The main focus of the exhibition was to reproduce a financial layout of global industrialisation and to promote market opportunities. The extended publicity it received was also enhanced by the design and the construction of the Crystal Palace that hosted the event, a fact that attributed to Greeks a sense of pride, which was described by the Greek press as the ‘great building, in one part of which free Greece can be found’ (Anastasopoulos cited in Yagou 2003, p. 84). Greece, as one of the 34 countries that accepted the invitation, contributed by exhibiting raw materials and craft artefacts, and even though its participation could not compete with the ones coming from industrialised countries such as France, it made a statement regarding its modern orientation and its ambition to become part of the world economic markets. Its positioning in the international

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spotlight was orchestrated by prominent figures of the Greek bourgeoisie (merchants and ship-owners) living outside Greece and even though the products were humble (marble, processed leather skins, sponges, silk embroideries, woodcarvings and dry fruits) and unrelated to the machine-crafted ‘shiny toys’ of the West, they received positive reviews and were awarded for excellence. What is of great interest though is that, among the products presented, there were items manufactured in areas under Ottoman occupation such as Thessaloniki and Crete. Some of the design efforts that received attention could be characterised as a rudimentary version of mass production (men costumes), which led the Greek press to disseminate positive sentiments about the industrial future of the country. On the contrary, a great part of the foreign press’ comments on Greece’s participation ridiculed the country’s lack of industrial activity and presented its modest products as unrefined tokens of poorness; it also justified its inability to stand equal to other European nations due to its former condition of barbaric oppression. Nonetheless, the outcome of the event was translated by Greek benefactors of diaspora as the beginning of a new era, and for that reason its documentation had to be circulated via donated publications (Yagou 2003). Accordingly, the Great Exhibition catalogue was introduced as the Holy Grail of design to schools and artists throughout the nation-state and the unfreed Hellenic peripheries. In this context, Greeks gained visual access to the material outcomes of the mechanical revolution, which they had never seen or experienced before and their aesthetic perception started to be severely influenced by the Western canon. Progressively, handmade artefacts of embroidery, textiles and traditional costumes, ceramics, silverware, stone and woodcarving lost their dominance in people’s everyday life. Poiesis, through techne signifying the use of hands, experiences and narratives of centuries, memory and the disclosure of being in a time–space continuum, was gradually replaced by non-authentic, mass-produced commodities. Items of craft and architectural monuments that have been rescued and survived from the process of Greece’s modernisation display an informal knowledge that has been greatly disregarded as ‘non-scientific’. Unjustifiably omitted, the differences of vernacular design in the Greek regions, from the Cyclades islands to the mountain villages of Epirus, demonstrate a profound understanding of the local milieu and its microclimate and deep care for routine domestic activities and communal events. As a case in point, the vernacular architecture on Mount Pelion (eighteenth century) was developed out of the need of the indigenous populations of the Thessaly region to protect themselves from piracy and destructive attacks that supplemented the Ottoman rule and took the form of defensive domestic architecture. It was also adjusted to the local microclimate of cool summers and harsh winters, by allowing vertical and horizontal migration of its inhabitants based on their activities, the season and the sun’s position. The horizontal migration (movement in the house, usage of rooms) was related to the quantity of natural light and thermal protection required for certain actions that directed the design and the materials used for the construction of rooms; for example, the living room as a space of gathering

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dictated plenty of light and lower thermal protection. Migrating vertically meant that the families had to move to an upper or a lower floor according to the season in order to avoid using heating or cooling methods or devices. Their comfort in these conditions was achieved through the lightweight and heavyweight structures within one building (Sakarellou-Tousi and Lau 2009). Despite the fact that, later on, modern architecture integrated elements of the aforementioned example demonstrated in Le Corbusier’s projects which were inspired by Greece (Le Corbusier 1931), the civilising task of the Westernised Greeks to disconnect the indigenous populations from traditional, ‘Easterly’ influenced design practices continued throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Especially with the influx of the Asia Minor and Pontic refugees after the Asia Minor catastrophe (1922), the project of Greece’s modernisation was reinvigorated through the necessity of housing more than a million displaced people. The Greek Government with financial aid provided by the League of Nations, built dwellings on the margins of urban centres while simultaneously seizing the opportunity to implement an anti-Oriental policy by modernising the image of the cities. An area in which the housing problem became a massive challenge was Kavala, a port city in Eastern Macedonia, where the state provided three housing settlements that were presented as counteract to the Oriental type dwellings. And even though the populations coming from Asia Minor and Pontus believed they were returning ‘home’, they were treated as the colonised, the ‘other’, by their colonisers, the indigenous Greeks. Their culture, heavily influenced by the East, was considered to be ‘low’ in comparison to the ‘high’ culture of neoclassicism and the European programme of Western-nationalisation. As explained by Dayana Salazar, in an effort to identify it closely with the West, and distance it from the ‘Orient’ the language and image of neoclassicism was appropriated as an iconographic bridge to provide an apparent historical continuum with Ancient Greece – legitimizing a claim to fatherland and culture. (Salazar 1998, p. 309) Vernacular architecture as well as all popular elements (objects, everyday habits) exhibiting a connection to the Ottoman past were explicitly misappropriated. The way of the West was the only legitimate direction to be trailed. Greek urbanism was uncritically mimicking the ‘prodigious’ designs of European metropolises and adopting design practices developed for cultures with different history, climate, financial status and industrial activity. Dekaokto, one of the three refugee settlements provided by the state, was built on the margins of the city and designed based on Western urban forms, totally disregarding traditional architecture and local customs of everyday life. The uprooted populations who moved there faced the animosity of the local indigenous people and their culture was perceived as subculture because of the ongoing propaganda against everything associated with the ‘Turkish daemon’. Despite the adversity of the situation, this marginalised neighbourhood was transformed by its refugee inhabitants via

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space and life, their domestic architecture, music, dance, shadow theatre, literature, their social and religious rituals. This re-creation served as a bridge to restore a severed way of life, providing the vehicle to establish a sense of continuity amidst the chaos of resettlement. (Salazar 1998, p. 317) These people reclaimed their right to live humanly by sustaining their values by transforming what was available and turning a depersonalised urban territory into a liquid space of interaction, where streets and pavements became the extension of their homes, their living room, their garden and their square. This act of resistance against modernity was also an unconscious gesture of selfpreservation. These people, lost in an unidentified hostile territory, tried to find their way back to life. But their existential design was gradually amalgamated into the broader design of developing Greece, a project that wiped out the memories of multiculturalism, authenticity and indigenous knowledge. Throughout the twentieth century, Athens and Thessaloniki, the largest urban centres of Greece, were utterly transformed into failed imitations of the European urban models; Thessaloniki, a hybrid of Occidental and Oriental influences for many centuries, was entirely redesigned after the great fire of 1917, abandoning a past of housing Christians, Jews and Muslims in ethnic–religious quarters and impromptu neighbourhoods in its medieval framework, to become a modern metropolis following imposed modern European standards. Modernity arrived with the domination of the apartment block as the prevalent residential type along with the adoption of reinforced concrete and the freehold land system (Hastaoglou-Martinidis 1997). The task of altering the image of the city from a blend of ethnicities and religions into a homogenised city fabric was accomplished through the eradication of previous spatial motives, ‘radical modernization’ and a ‘new appropriation of urban space based on social and economic criteria’ (Hastaolgou-Martinidis 1997, p. 497). From that point on, urban development became the vehicle for modernisation, supported by the great wave of internal migration in the 1950s and 1960s, when practices such as the exchange in kind phenomenon (antiparochi12), a quid pro quo method which was uncritically accepted by people living in semi-urban and urban areas (Kotzamanis 1997), resulted in the adoption of multi-storey buildings as dwelling forms of entrapment and alienation. Immigrants and rural people living in the city were progressively absorbed and eventually embraced the ‘conspicuous consumption’ lifestyle (Veblen 1994), leaving behind their identities as tradition keepers and memory disseminators. Anthony Giddens described the following context as the locus of formation and control of the modern self: ‘in a post traditional social universe, reflexively organised, permeated by abstract systems, and in which the reordering of time and space realigns the local with the global, the self undergoes massive change’ (Giddens 1991, p. 80). These abstract systems that penetrated everyday life by undermining pre-modern modes of local control instigated a massive de-skilling and loss of local knowledge. Greeks did

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not need to use their skills in order to execute activities related to the local community and the physical environment. On the contrary, they were forced to obtain reappropriated skills and knowledge, relevant to specific activities in their limited action environments; they had to perceive themselves ‘contextually situated in time and space’ (Giddens 1991, p. 187), in a globalised milieu where ‘globalized connections, together with high consequence risks, represent parameters of social life over which the situated individual has relatively little control’ (Giddens 991, p. 192). Eventually, the mission of modernising Greece was complete in the beginning of the last decade of the twentieth century. Greeks had arrived in the land of prosperity and fantasy. They had access to all that can be bought and sold. They were consuming their way into happiness. And they were ‘inferior’ semi-Orients no more. During the process of progress and development no questions were raised regarding boundaries and securities within the framework of modern homogeneity. Superficial sameness created an illusion of shaking off the ‘periphery’ tag, a categorisation created and given to Greece by the First World, but only for a short period of time. In the second decade of the twenty-first century the situation has shifted again and a ‘Hellene of the world’ is a disgraced figure, a black hole in a global political and financial flux. Ironically, the post-modern epoch of globalisation for Greeks has eventually turned into a lécher la vitrine (‘licking at the shop window’) experience, a phrase borrowed from Achille Mbembe describing globalisation in Africa (cited in Geschiere 1997, p. 1). To put it schematically, by being heavily indebted to external monetary entities and bound to its European Union commitments, Greece has lost its independence and national authority, and has become another example of re-colonisation, this time by the new ‘empires’ (James and Nairn, 2006), the international financial bodies. In that event, being the collateral damage of the diachronic accumulation of the rhetoric of modernity (salvation, conviviality, prosperity and freedom) and its darker side, the logic of coloniality (discrimination, racism, domination, unilateralism and exploitation) (Harvey 2000) has left Greece numbed and its people confused and in despair with predominantly two choices: to accept the humiliation of being inferior to those who decided that they are inferior, or to assimilate. And to assimilate means that they accept their inferiority and resign themselves to play the game that is not theirs but that has been imposed upon them. (Mignolo 2011, p. 275) Greece’s present governmental obedience to the ‘Emperor’ and the fragmented acts of citizens’ resistance against the aftermath of the country’s financial collapse demonstrate a humiliating defeat and a non-acceptance of what needs to be left behind: the sweet paralysis caused by consumption and self-indulgence. In the light of this evidence, the absence of a narrative of a different future, disengaged from nihilism and negation, invites a new discourse that will provide

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the platform for Greece, and accordingly for similar cases, to demolish its previous construction of imported ideas, politics, education, economy, aesthetics, design en masse. Arturo Escobar’s (2012, p. 45) question as to whether ‘design can be extricated from its modernist embeddedness and redirected towards other constellations of ontological premises, practices, narratives, and performances’ should be placed at the centre of this quest as well as a new imagery inspired by decolonial and border thinking (Mignolo 2000), and set on independent decision making, uncommitted to ‘external’ agendas. It is funny how, under the current obscureness of financial and political turbulence, the country’s most successful efforts at revival come from re-introducing the world to the ‘traditional production’ of Greece; the same one that was mocked and ridiculed in the Crystal Palace when the nation-state was making its world stage debut. And it is kind of ironic in a twisted historical sense when discussions are currently taking place for the resurrection of Crystal Palace (Wainwright 2013). Local entrepreneurs put their efforts into turning cultural into financial capital by promoting to the global markets ‘crocheted dresses made by hand by local women in the Cyclades, silver handmade fastenings wielded by Athenian silversmiths, silk blouses weaved in the North of Greece and dresses embroidered with traditional patterns by artisans in Crete’ (Zeus and Dione 2013) and also by emphasising the locality of the products and the means of their production (traditional weaving and spinning techniques). In addition, Greek food gets rebranded as a commodity and takes back some of the nation’s lost pride via ‘products sourced from small, independent, honest producers who have stayed faithful to what they know best’ (Ergon 2013): customary ways of ‘Poiein’. Still, even if these endeavours turn out to be lucrative and successful, they will remain isolated incidents of an economic improvement that will impact positively the lives of the few involved and leave unaffected a number of categories of people (unemployed, immigrants, young practitioners, pensioners) that will continue to look for a way out of a degrading routine. So, what happens to the ones that are constantly being left behind, that don’t see any ‘windows of opportunity’ opening up for them? How can they gain or reclaim their forgone dignity? How can this country resist its enforced classifications as ‘irremediable’, ‘hopeless’, ‘Third World’, ‘doomed’? Against this background, issues to be explored are not the opportunistic exploitation of the ‘pre-modern’, but the ontological re-design of the inhabitants of Greece, motivated by the recognition of the failures of modernity and modernism, individualism and the adoption of a material driven society, and determined by a new sense of egality, via the discovery of an authentic, custom made, local dialectic that identifies the contemporary lack of sustainment, rising unsettlement and poverty and the inability of existing remedies to make a future out of the present. As phrased by Tony Fry (2011, p. 252) ‘radical change is unavoidable and it demands a process of decision and directive action that brings the two imperatives of freedom and futuring together to form an unbreakable unity’; a freedom that has always been pursued but never achieved for Greece.

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On this note, the intention of this chapter was not to provide a definite statement applicable to the situation, but rather to raise questions regarding unseen or underdeveloped potentials that could encourage the development of a communal mobility, capable of generating innovation and remaking Greece as a far more viable culture and society with a sustain-able economy, ‘one with a different basis of material and symbolic exchange’ (Fry 2009, p. 215); the possibility of a way of being that can be nourished in the borders, in exteriority, a proposal that can actually come from the margins.

Notes 1 The first nation-state was constituted in 1832 (Tsaoussis 1976). 2 The alleged special treatment Greece was receiving as a province of the Byzantine Empire (330–1453AD) because of the adoption of ancient Greek language by the Byzantine state and their common bond to Orthodox Christianity did not protect many of its parts from being ravaged and occupied by the Teutonic Herules (third century AD), Goths of Alaric (fourth century AD), Slavs (sixth and seventh century AD) and Albanians (fourteenth century AD) (Campbell and Sherrard 1969). 3 Phanariots: they were an Ottoman Christian elite which, despite structural impediments, imperial ideology, and religious doctrine that would preclude their participation in Ottoman governance, ascended to power in multiple political arenas between the 1660s and 1821 (Philliou 2009, p. 151). 4 The head of the village. 5 The Great Idea as a term and ideological framework was presented in the Greek National Assembly (14 January 1844) by Ioannis Kolettis, a Bonaparte-influenced medical doctor, in his effort to address the necessity of liberating all Greek lands, especially Constantinople. However, the term first appeared in a work of Alexander Soutsos, a Greek poet in 1843 (Kitromilides 1998): And if there were to come to the Race some great idea of setting its lifeless limbs in motion and if it sought its ancestral heritage, the empire of its Comnene great-grandfathers, what rash spirit would show resistance to this and smother this voice of all the people within and without [Greece’s borders]? 6 Topikismos (local consciousness/localism): A romantic reaction against capitalism and globalisation via the revival of local place in a milieu designated by the ‘postmodern condition’ (Harvey 1989). 7 This term refers to ‘bricolage’ as defined by Lévi-Strauss (1962, p. 11): mythical thought is that it expresses itself by means of a heterogeneous repertoire which, even if extensive, is nevertheless limited. It has to use this repertoire, however, whatever the task in hand because it has nothing else at its disposal. Mythical thought is therefore a kind of intellectual bricolage. 8 The Venizelist Liberals (led by Eleftherios Venizelos) and the Royalists (led by King Constantine). 9 In 1936, politician Ioannis Metaxas, by taking non-democratic measures (self-coup), established an authoritarian regime, best known as the ‘4th of August Regime’ (1936–1941). 10 The Greek civil war (1946–1949) was fought between the National Republican Greek League (EDES) supported by the Greek government, Britain and the United States

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and the National Liberation Front (EAM), and its guerrilla units, the National People’s Liberation Army (ELAS), supported by the Communist Bloc. 11 European Commission, Economic and Financial Affairs: http://ec.europa.eu/economy_ finance/euro/countries/greece_en.htm. 12 Antiparochi is a building contract under which the contractor of the construction offers an apartment (or a number of apartments) to the owner of a small piece of land, in exchange for resigning any claims to the new building or land.

References Adamopoulos, J. 1977, ‘The dimensions of the Greek concept of philotimo’, The Journal of Social Psychology, vol. 102, pp. 313–314. Balibar, E. 2009, ‘Europe as borderland’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 27, pp. 190–215. Benjamin, W. 1999, The Arcades Project, trans. H. Eiland and K. Mclaughlin, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Bien, P. 2005, ‘Inventing Greece’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies, vol. 23, pp. 217–234. Campbell, P. and Sherrard, J. 1969, Modern Greece, Praeger, New York. Drummond, A. 1754, Travels Through Different Cities of Germany, Italy, Greece and Several Parts of Asia, as far as the Banks of The Euphrates: In a Series of Letters, W. Strahan, London. Ergon 2013, www.ergonproducts.gr (accessed 11 September 2013). Escobar, A. 2012, Notes on the Ontology of Design, unpublished paper, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC. Fanon, F. 1963, The Wretched of the Earth, Grove Press, New York. Foucault, M. 1984, ‘What is Enlightenment?’ in P. Rabinow (ed.) The Foucault Reader, Pantheon, New York, pp. 32–50. Frazee, C. 1969, The Orthodox Church and Independent Greece, 1821–1852, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Fry, T. 2009, Design Futuring: Sustainability, Ethics and New Practice, Berg, London. Fry, T. 2011, Design as Politics, Berg, London. Geschiere, P. 1997, The Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa, University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville and London. Giddens, A. 1991, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age, Stanford University Press, CA. Habermas, J., Lennox, S. and Lennox, F. 1964, ‘The public sphere: An encyclopedia article’, New German Critique, no. 3, pp. 49–55. Harvey, D. 1989, The Condition of Postmodernity, Blackwell, Oxford. Harvey, D. 2000, ‘Cosmopolitanism and the banality of geographical evils’, Public Culture, vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 529–564. Hastaoglou-Martinidis, V. 1997, ‘A Mediterranean city in transition: Thessaloniki between the two world wars’, Facta Universitatis, vol. 1, no. 4, pp. 493–507. James, P. and Nairn, T. 2006, ‘Globalizing empires: A critical introduction’, in P. James and T. Nairn (eds) Globalization and Violence: Globalizing Empires, Old and New, vol. 1, Sage Publications, London, pp. 13–39. Jusdanis, G. 1987, ‘East is East – West is West: It’s a matter of Greek literary history’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 1–14. Jusdanis, G. 2001, The Necessary Nation, Princeton University Press, NJ. Kazantzakis, N. 1952, Zorba the Greek, trans. C. Wildman, Touchstone, New York. Kitromilides, P. 1989, ‘“Imagined communities” and the origins of the national question in the Balkans’, European History Quarterly, vol. 19, pp. 149–190.

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Kitromilides, P. 1994, Enlightenment, Nationalism, Orthodoxy: Studies in the Culture and Political Thought of Southeastern Europe, Variorum, VT. Kitromilides, P. 1998, ‘On the intellectual content of Greek nationalism: Paparrigopoulos, Byzantium and the Great Idea’, in D. Ricks and P. Magdalino (eds) Byzantium and the Modern Greek Identity, Centre for Hellenic Studies, King’s College, Ashgate Publishing, Farnham. Kitromilides, P. 2010, ‘The Enlightenment and the Greek cultural tradition’, History of European Ideas, vol. 36, no. 1, pp. 39–46. Kotzamanis, V. 1997, ‘Athens 1848–1995. The demographic emergence of a metropolis’, The Greek Review of Social Research, vol. 92, no. 93, pp. 3–30 (in Greek). Latour, B. 1993, We’ve Never Been Modern, trans. C. Porter, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Le Corbusier, 1931, Towards a New Architecture, Courier Dover Publications, New York. Lee, D. 1959, Freedom and Culture, Spectrum Books, New York. Legg, K. and Roberts, J. 1997, Modern Greece: A Civilization on the Periphery, Westview Press, Boulder, CO. Lévi-Strauss, C. 1962, The Savage Mind, trans. G. Weidenfield and Nicholson Ltd., University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. Martin, D. 1978, A General Theory of Secularisation, Basil Blackwell, Oxford. Mignolo, W. 2000, ‘The many faces of cosmo-polis: Border thinking and critical cosmopolitanism’, Public Culture, vol. 12, no. 3, pp. 721–748. Mignolo, W. 2011, ‘Geopolitics of sensing and knowing: On (de)coloniality, border thinking and epistemic disobedience’, Postcolonial Studies, vol. 14, no. 3, pp. 273–283. Miller, H. 1942, The Colossus of Maroussi, Secker and Warburg, London. Mouzelis, N. 1978, Modern Greece: Facets of Underdevelopment, The Macmillan Press Ltd, London. Peckham, R. S. 2000, ‘Map mania: Nationalism and the politics of place in Greece’, Political Geography, vol. 19, pp. 77–95. Petmesidou, M. 2011, ‘What future for the middle classes and “inclusive solidarity” in South Europe?’, Global Social Policy, vol. 11, pp. 225–227. Philliou, C. 2009, ‘Communities on the verge: Unraveling the phanariot ascendancy in Ottoman governance’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 51, no. 1, pp. 151–181. Pollis, A. 1965, ‘Political implications of the modern Greek concept of self’, The British Journal of Sociology, vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 29–47. Sadowski, A. 2009, ‘The borderland of civilizations as a research category in the sociology of borderland’, Limes, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 82–92. Sakarellou-Tousi, N. and Lau, B. 2009, ‘The vernacular dwellings of Mount Pelion in Greece: A migratory living pattern’, in PLEA2009, 26th Conference on Passive and Low Energy Architecture, Quebec City, Canada, 22–24 June 2009. Salazar, D. 1998, ‘Persistence of the vernacular: A minority shaping urban form’, Journal of Urban Design, vol. 3, no. 3, pp. 303–330. Stavrakakis, Y. 2003, ‘Politics and religion: On the “politicization” of Greek church discourse’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies, vol. 21, pp. 153–181. Tangney, J. 1990, ‘Assessing individual differences in proneness to shame and guilt: Development of the self-conscious affect and attribution inventory’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 59, no. 1, pp. 102–111. Tsaoussis, D. G. 1976, ‘Greek social structure’, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, vol. 268, pp. 429–441.

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Tsoucalas, C. 1991, ‘“Enlightened” concepts in the “dark”: Power and freedom, politics and society’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 1–22. Veblen, T. 1994, The Theory of the Leisure Class in the Collected Works of Thorstein Veblen, vol. 1, Routledge, London, original work published 1899. Wainwright, O. 2013, ‘Raising the glass: Crystal Palace to come back from the dead’, The Guardian, 27 July, www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/jul/26/crystal-palacerebuild-chinese-developer (accessed 29 July 2013). Weingrod, A. 1968, ‘Patrons, patronage, and political parties’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 10, no. 4, pp. 377–400. Yagou, A. 2003, ‘Facing the West: Greece in the Great Exhibition of 1851’, Design Issues, vol. 19, no. 4, pp. 82–90. Zeus and Dione, 2013, www.zeusndione.com (accessed 10 September 2013).

3 MODERNITY AND DESIGN IN THE ARAB WORLD Professional identity and social responsibility Samer Akkach

The question of the Eurocentricity that lies at the heart of Orientalism and postcolonial discourses is premised on the assumption that the European tradition, its history and modes of thought, is essentially different from other non-European traditions and that European hegemony has marginalised and obliterated other differences. The question and its ensuing theories have been instrumental in generating diverse lines of design thinking and practice, at both institutional and individual levels. The question has been polarising, often creating problematic, unsustainable and irresolvable divisions in a rapidly globalising world. A line of design thinking and practice, which has thrived on such problematic division, is the one concerned with cultural identity. This trend has dominated the intellectual scenes in the Third World since decolonisation in the second half of the twentieth century. The main preoccupation of this trend has been the idea of difference. The search for cultural identity in all spheres of thought and practice has been essentially a search for difference. Often more imagined than real, fascinating spectrums of cultural differences have been pursued and constructed in various contexts. In recent years, however, this constructed difference has rapidly withered under the dominating pressures of globalisation. Today, the pressing challenges posed by global environmental problems have become universal and the collective drive for technological solutions has rendered cultural differences all the more irrelevant. In these global conditions a new approach to dealing with the issue of Eurocentricity has emerged, one that is premised on commonality and entangled history rather than difference and divided history (Bayly 2004; Therborn 2003; Weber 2009). In this approach, which focuses on early modernity and how the modern world emerged, the assumption of difference that has underlined Eurocentrism for decades has been called into question. As European dominance coincided with the rise of modern science, technological advancement and the Enlightenment, and as an increasing number of studies are now showing these to

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be products of an entangled history and cross-cultural interactions, the very notion of Eurocentrism has assumed a different complexion. If non-European cultures can be brought into the making of this constructed Eurocentricity, then the question of difference and that of cultural identity must be investigated and addressed on new grounds. These would be common grounds, where cross-cultural interactions have always been the norm, and where problems, opportunities and challenges share trans-national and cross-cultural outcomes. On these common grounds the emergence and development of the modern concept of ‘design’ becomes a shared experience across cultures, and especially in the Mediterranean world where the Arabs and Ottomans had vigorous interactions with the Europeans for centuries. Perhaps no cultures have been closer to Europe in early modernity than that of the Arab–Ottoman, so exploring the emergence and development of the modern concept of design from both the European and Arab–Ottoman perspectives reveals its entangled history. For most contemporary Arab designers working in various design fields, and especially in architecture, tas.mı-m, ‘design’, is a transparent, self-evident and uncomplicated term. Its meaning is immediate and familiar; it hardly begs an explanation. Its ubiquitous and uncritical adoption throughout the Arab world for every design activity gives the impression that it has always and everywhere been in use. A few, perhaps, recognise that it is only a modern term with a very short and peculiar history, one that coincides with the institutionalisation of architectural design education over the course of the past century. Even fewer realise that conceptually ‘design’ is not universally stable across time, geography and culture, that its meaning has a history, and that there is an unrecognised social structure inscribed in its very constitution.1 In this brief study I shall trace the history of the emergence of the term tas.mı-m in the Arab world as an integral part of the evolution of the concept of ‘design’ in Europe since the Renaissance. Its main aim is threefold: first, to show how a new understanding of ‘design’, as a cognitive operation of the creative mind and an elitist skill mysterious in nature, formed the basis upon which the social status of the architect was changed; second, to explain how this has effectively distanced the designer from the society they meant to serve and undermined their sense of social responsibility; and third, to reveal how all of these were inscribed in the very nature of design/tas.mı-m as a shared mode of understanding and practice among both European and Arab design educators and professionals.2

Designers are different In the introduction to his influential treatise On the Art of Building, famous Renaissance painter, sculptor and architect Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) considered architecture to be ‘among the most honorable of the arts’ (Alberti 1989, p. 3). ‘Architecture, if you think the matter over carefully’, he wrote, ‘gives comfort and pleasure to mankind, to individual and community alike’ (Alberti 1989, p. 3). Addressing his patron Lorenzo de’ Medici, he said: ‘I should explain exactly whom I mean by an architect; for it is no carpenter that I would have you compare

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to the greatest exponents of other disciplines: the carpenter is but an instrument in the hand of the architect’ (Alberti 1989, p. 3). He went on to paint the image of a great hero, whose unique skills and virtues depend on ‘the security, dignity, and honor of the republic’ (Alberti 1989, p. 5). Leon Battista Alberti concluded by saying that In view then of the delight and wonderful grace of his work, and of how indispensable they have proved, and in view of the benefit and convenience of his inventions, and their service to posterity, he should no doubt be accorded praise and respect, and be counted among those most deserving of mankind’s honor and recognition. (Alberti 1989, p. 5) Until Leon Battista Alberti’s time, the professional identity of the architect was that of the master craftsman, the carpenter, and his social status was rather ambiguous. This was the same in the Islamic world, as designers were considered among the makers and manufacturers, .sunna‘ (sing. .sa-ni‘). In his campaign to change this image, Leon Battista Alberti was commenting on Vitruvius’ Ten Books, which was written over 1,500 years earlier. Between the two canonical texts, little of significance was written on architecture (Vitruvius 1960). Through these two canonical texts, and despite the long span of time that separates them, the Western tradition has esteemed architects more than other traditions, such as the Islamic tradition, for example, wherein no equivalent books are found and very little is known about architects up to the late nineteenth century.3 In many ways, today’s professional image of the architect owes much to Leon Battista Alberti, and the architect’s social status still carries the vestiges of his self-centred projection. The current perception of the architect as a creative genius with unique design skills and lofty ideas, a visionary artist with social, ethical and environmental responsibilities, whose mission in life is to change the world and bring about a better living environment, while often needing to educate an ignorant public, has its roots in Leon Battista Alberti’s successful campaign. In a sense, Leon Battista Alberti’s intervention transformed the architect from being a maker to becoming a thinker, from one for whom design is a way of life through making, to one for whom design is an intellectual commodity that can be exchanged through the transaction of ideas and meanings. The new image of the architect constructed around the new function of design was further articulated in the nineteenth and early twentieth century with the institutionalisation of architectural design education. Through such formal academic initiation a critical division of labour between the intellectual and the manual aspects of making was introduced and sustained, as ‘design’ was theorised to be the very thing that sets architects apart not only from other makers in the building industry but also from society at large. As a cognitive exercise concerned with generating ideas, making meanings and solving problems, design became an elitist practice detached from its social context; designers moved further away from their original role as makers towards being thinkers. Consequently, ‘Architecture’

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began to assume a new meaning and be differentiated from architecture as mere building. Anyone can build a dumb box, but only architects can design beautiful buildings and produce an Architecture imbued with patronising ideas (Ghirardo 1991). This understanding has had serious impacts on the professional identity of the architect and his/her social image, resulting in a deep schism between the profession and society. Moreover, architects were not content with reducing their great design ambitions to mere form and aesthetics, for this alone would not render them, according to Leon Battista Alberti’s vision, as ‘most deserving of mankind’s honor and recognition’. Thus, the conceptualisation of design expanded within the emerging binaries of art and science, theory and practice, while maintaining an indefinable mysterious core tied to notions of inspiration and creativity. Design has since become essentially a mysterious act of the designer’s creative mind (Snodgrass and Coyne 2006).4

Design and social responsibility The new professional identity of the designer Leon Battista Alberti projected began to take shape in the nineteenth century, both in Europe and the Arab–Ottoman world, as a new mode of design education became institutionalised. While the Arab term for design, tas.mı-m, might have been mostly absent in nineteenth-century Arabic literature, and its use was limited to small circles, the institutionalisation of ‘design’ education, following Western models, had already turned it into an elitist skill. This had a negative impact on the traditional society whose unindustrialised economy and marketplace were unable to accommodate the new generations of professional architects and engineers. Al-Ja-mi‘a al-‘Uthma-niyya (Ottoman Chronicle), a monthly political, scientific and literary journal set up by one of the leading Arab intellectuals, Farah. Ant.oun (1874–1922), in the late nineteenth century (the first issue appeared on 15 March 1899), devoted a regular section to education and pedagogy. In the second issue of April 1899, the matter of the social impact of modern professional education was raised, highlighting the growing gap between the real needs of society and the elitist skills of the new graduates. Describing the dilemma new graduates were facing, the author wrote: This is why you see them graduating from the schools in a state of disorientation not knowing what work they should do or what door they should knock. They despise handcrafts (s.ana-’i‘) because, in their opinions, the school’s professional education has elevated them above these [old practices], even if they were the professions of their fathers and grandfathers, and because they became deprived of the hand skills required for them to be able to practice the ones they considered ‘noble’. Hence, they fall in the abyss of unemployment, which is the mother of all immoralities, the source of poverty and misery, the cause of self-destruction, and the annihilator of the nation’s creative forces, because it wastes the youth of its young men. (Ant.oun 1899, p. 23)

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The serious social rift modern professional education introduced into Arab society undermined the traditional modes of production and distanced design professionals, mainly architects, from the societies they were supposed to serve. A similar rift took place in Western societies, albeit in a slightly different mode, which led to the questioning of the architect’s self-centred image and professional identity. Over two decades ago, a group of critics published an insightful social critique of the architectural profession, questioning the merit of its constructed identity and the truth of the architect’s sense of social responsibility (Ghirardo 1991). The critique, which is more valid today than ever before, identified three related gaps inherent in the very constitution of the profession, which led to the growing rift between the architects and their societies. First is the gap between the architects’ individual concerns and ambitions and the collective professional inertia, which has failed to mobilise individual aspirations into an effective social force. This represents, according to Margaret Crawford (1991), ‘a persistent barrier between the needs of the professional identity and the demands of social responsibility’. Second is the gap between what the architect aspires to do and what he/she is taught to do. The architect’s individual concerns for social and economic justice are not predicated on rigorous training in these areas. Architects are taught to address social and economic issues through the medium of form, meaning and aesthetics. Third is the gap between the architect, seen as a member of an elite group sharing special design skills, and other producers of the built environment with no design skills, such as developers, builders and contractors, who in fact have more influence over the shared field of operation. This has resulted in a serious break between the architect’s domain of operation and domain of influence, and in the seeing of the architect’s ‘architecture’ as a luxury rather than an indispensable service (Crawford 1991). These problems have often been traced back to the legacies of the European Enlightenment and the influence of the French Beaux-Arts tradition. After the crucial division of labour, introduced along with Leon Battista Alberti’s new vision, design in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries became aligned closely with the then emerging concept of art. The liberal, mysterious and idiosyncratic character of art appealed to the architects; architectural design gradually became a detached, artistic and highly theorised practice concerned mainly with meaning, aesthetics and form manipulation. This effectively fulfilled Leon Battista Alberti’s vision, and the architect thus became different from the carpenter, the master mason and indeed all craftsmen, who were reduced to mere instruments in the architect’s hand. Architectural design was conceptualised to signify something unique and different: an intellectual and artistic activity superior to craft. In the nineteenth century, John Ruskin regarded the artist/architect as owing ‘allegiance to Beauty’, which he equated with truth. For him only artists and architects were peculiarly suited to illuminating this equation and to introducing beauty and truth to the untutored public by realising their creative potentials (Crawford 1991). This view was later crystallised in Le Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture, as he wrote:

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The Architect, by his arrangement of forms, realises an order which is a pure creation of his spirit; by forms and shapes he affects our senses to an acute degree and provokes plastic emotions; by the relationships which he creates he wakes profound echoes in us, he gives us the measure of an order which we feel to be in accordance with that of our world, he determines the various movements of our heart and of our understanding; it is then that we experience the sense of beauty. (Le Corbusier 1946, p. 1) This poetic image of the architect was conveniently exploited by the profession in order to establish, sustain and protect a professional field of operation capable of securing financial prosperity for, and conferring distinctive social status on, its members. Architects and critics worked together to develop a rubric for evaluating buildings, to define what architecture is, and to exclude what it is not, focusing primarily on form, meaning and shared aesthetics (Ghirardo 1991). Through the agency of the theorised practice of design, ‘architecture came to be understood as an exercise in meaning that issues from the architect’ (Ghirardo 1991, pp. 9–10). Architects also came to genuinely believe that architecture has potent critical function, that they could ‘engage critically with contemporary problems through formal manipulation’ (Ghirardo 1991, p. 9), and that through clever designs they can solve complex social and cultural problems (Ghirardo 1991).5 With this radical shift, however, the architects have, wittingly or unwittingly, distanced themselves more and more from the real issues affecting society. Instead of seeing their work as interventions into a world with serious social, economic, ethical and environmental consequences, they preferred to operate in a confined space that demands little more than self-expression and effete cultural commentary (Ghirardo 1991). The self-serving approach of the architectural profession has contributed to mystifying architecture and to drive a deep wedge between the architect’s lofty ideas and idiosyncratic aspirations and the mundane concerns of the public, which is often portrayed as failing to understand or appreciate the architect’s mission and intentions. This disconnection with society reveals serious contradictions. First, the architects have declared themselves, more by default than intention, as the custodians of the built environment, since this is their primary field of study and operation, yet they have condemned the overwhelming number of constructions erected annually as non-architecture for not meeting the profession’s self-imposed criteria. As it is almost impossible to reach consensus on what architecture is within the profession itself, let alone the wider public, there has been within the professional orthodoxy a tacit agreement that ‘architecture’ proper excludes most non-architect designed buildings (Ghirardo 1991, p. 11). Thus, while architects aspire to have influence over the built environment, they have chosen to detach themselves, rather arrogantly, from the overwhelming mass of buildings that makes up the urban environment. With this stance the architects’ domain of influence became removed from their domain of study and operation, and the high moral, social and

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environmental targets they set for themselves became beyond their control. This break between the architects’ domain of operation and domain of influence has resulted in public indifference to their ambitions. Faced with such indifference, architects have found solace in closing in on themselves and in sharing self-gratifying rhetoric in their own professional literature and activities, further alienating themselves from the wider social circles they belong to. The profession’s real domain of influence remains architectural education. Through the dated accreditation system they established, they have continued to control what is being taught in the architectural schools. This is despite the widely recognised fact that the old relationship that used to bind the profession to the schools has dramatically changed over the past 30 years or so.6 When the profession established the schools, the aim was to create educational institutions that serve the profession. Today, however, schools are theoretically and pedagogically way ahead of the profession, which has become more of a restricting burden than an enabling force in the current drive to explore new and radical terrains of architectural design education. With the emergence of the modern concept of tas.mı-m in the Arab world, these issues became local in as much as they were European, having been instituted through both education and professional practice. Yet, the Arab world, which suffers largely from widespread poverty, social inequity and political corruptions, was not poised to make room for this new breed of professional designer. The modern architect, as a professional with elitist design skills, had thus remained restricted with very limited space for self-realisation. In a society where the vast majority of the population hardly affords basic living needs, the architect’s grand ideas remain an unrealisable luxury. Slums and illegal neighbourhoods are fast growing in many Arab cities, covering huge areas and creating social, environmental and economic problems of unprecedented scale and magnitude. The social and architectural reality in most Arab cities is a far cry from the images of luxury and affluence often projected from selected areas of the Gulf States. Quite to the contrary, poverty and destitution are the norm. By professional training Arab architects are not prepared to deal with such social problems; this is not architecture after all. In fact, the vast majority of Arab architects do not even practise architecture; they no longer belong among the makers or the thinkers of architecture. If they have not fallen into the ‘abyss of unemployment’, as foreshadowed by Arab intellectuals in the nineteenth century, they are engaged in something unrelated to their professional training. Those few who remain in practice, however, are trained to think of social problems through forms and aesthetics, which render them rather ineffective as makers and social agents.

Design as t.as.mı-m Throughout medieval Islamic history .san‘a was the closest term to ‘design’ in the Arabic language, which did not present us with a definite alternative until the institutionalisation of architectural design education in the late nineteenth and early

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twentieth century, when a completely new term, tas.mı-m, hitherto unused as such, suddenly emerged. There was the term handasa, the verbal form of which meant ‘design’, and from which came the term muhandis, currently used for ‘engineer’ and ‘architect’, but this term was not universally used as an equivalent to design. There were also other common terms concerned with planning, organisation and management, such as khit.at., tadbı-r and tanz.-ım, which were associated with design, yet none was used consistently across many fields in the sense of design as was .san‘a. S. an‘a corresponds to the Latin ars, ‘art’, and the Greek techne, ‘craftsmanship’ and ‘art’, of which tekton means an ‘artisan’ and ‘woodworker’ or ‘carpenter’.7 The conceptual frame of the Arabic term was articulated with reference to the Greek understanding of the process of designing as making, through which a formless material substance, hyle, must always be wedded to an abstract form in order to bring about a sensible object.8 Arts had a practical and an intellectual side to them, as we can see in Ikhwa-n al-S.afa-’s dedication of the eighth epistle of the mathematical sciences, in their famous Rasa-i’l (Epistles) to the Practical Arts and their Purposes, and the ninth to the Intellectual Arts and their Purposes (al-S.afa-’ 1957). Despite this theoretical distinction between intellectual and practical arts (s.a-ni‘), there was no corresponding division of labour in the process of making.9 Making or designing involved both practical and intellectual activities, and makers were not socially distinct by virtue of their unique design skills alone.10 Today, tas.mı-m has surpassed all other terms and become the only Arabic word used for design, in the broad as well as specific sense, throughout the Arabicspeaking world. Thus tas.mı-m applies to all fields of the built environment and technology, such as architectural, interior, industrial, graphic, landscape, environmental, mechanical design, and so forth, with the same broad spectrum of usages and meanings as can be found in Western discourses. Despite its foreignness, conceptually and semantically the term is not without some relevance to the modern meaning of design and designing understood as a cognitive, rather than practical, exercise in decision making. Tas.mı-m came from the verb .sammama which means ‘to decide firmly’, ‘to firm up one’s mind’ and ‘to have an intent and conviction’ for completing a task and achieving an outcome. The root .samam, literally ‘deafness’, points, though indirectly, to the self-centred nature of designing as understood in the modern sense as a private act centred within the creative mind of the designer. In other words, design creativity tends to be a subjectively isolated ‘deaf’ process. The resolve, definitude and assuredness implicit in the term carry the positivistic traits of the Enlightenment, within the crucible of which it was born. It is this state of complete self-centred command that enables the designer to cull all possible choices and commit firmly to selected idea(s) that characterise the act of designing in the modern sense. Remarkably, and in the manner of the Enlightenment, the term tas.mı-m broke with the nexus of traditional meanings that aligned designing with craftsmanship, art, technique and machine, that is, with the practical wisdom of making. In its new theoretical context, tas.mı-m was articulated with reference to the modern, bourgeois approach that rigidly separated the world of the arts from that of technology, the designers from the labourers and the thinkers from the

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makers. With this separation, making and the process of production were broken into two branches that were alienated from each other: the technical, quantitative and manual on one side; and the aesthetic, qualitative and intellectual on the other (Flusser and Cullars 1995). This was particularly traceable in the critical transformations that took place in architectural design during the Renaissance. These transformations in the nature of design and the professional identity of the architect were integrated into the Arabic-speaking world through the institutionalisation of architectural design education in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Then design thinking and practices underwent significant changes, as the modern Arabic term tas.mı-m began to take on new theoretical dimensions. Born within the broad intellectual framework of the European Enlightenment, with which Arab intellectuals vigorously engaged, modern design thinking grew within the split between art and science, theory and practice, the subjective and objective expressions of creativity. Thus, design thinking in the Arab world was intertwined with the Western developments and became concerned, cognitively rather than technically, primarily with form, meaning and aesthetics. Yet, until the second half of the twentieth century Arab designers remained more as makers than thinkers, and in the process of making they used to exercise their choices with certain technical, economic, aesthetic, environmental and moral concerns. In the absence of a stabilising and universally accepted design paradigm, these concerns followed social needs more than the designer’s ego and creative urges, and were shaped more by the changing conditions of design production as well as by socio-economic and environmental demands than by self-expression and the vagaries of taste.

Marginalisation and return The idea of design returning from the margin presupposes an understanding of the processes of marginalisation, which are historically specific in different cultural contexts. In the Arab world, both the popular narrative and the official history set the intense encounter with Europe in the nineteenth century as the start of Western dominance and the marginalisation of local presence. They also set the postcolonial period as the beginning of the return; this was marked by the selfconscious search for cultural identity and the assertion of a national voice. This view has been predicated on the divided historical view of modernity, which assumes that modernity is a purely Western enterprise, from which the Arabs borrowed wholesale, as indeed did other nations, design theories, education and practice. In fact this is a popular narrative not just in the Arab world but also in other parts of the Third World. Starting with the alternative narrative, which is based on the entangled history of modernity and which considers cross-cultural interaction as the norm for civilisational development, then the processes of marginalisation and return assume different trajectories. In these trajectories the notion of cultural autonomy and borrowing has no place, since it views the process of civilisation as shared ownership that ebbs and flows in different ways during different periods. From this

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perspective, the nineteenth century, which has been described as the age of Arab liberal thinking, appears as a highly productive period, during which the Arabs were eager and unreserved in their efforts to reclaim a position in the European intellectual and scientific developments, and to become genuine, creative partners in the making of modernity and the advancement of sciences and the arts. From this perspective, the process of marginalisation began much later in the postcolonial period and coincided with the self-conscious desire of the Arabs to disentangle themselves from the colonisers’ history, the history of the West, and to rewrite their independent national history and reconstruct their cultural identity. A period of resistance and emancipation though it might be, it has, in many ways, proved to be a disabling and marginalising experience that ran counter to the cross-cultural grains of social reality, resulting in the conflicting state with the West that we are currently witnessing today. In the nineteenth century interaction with Europe was vigorous and productive, notwithstanding the many disapproving voices. New schools were set up, new curricula were introduced, numerous new magazines and newspapers were established, new scientific academies and learned societies were formed. Intellectuals and reformers had an insatiable appetite for enlightenment and boundless energies to explore new ideas and venture into new terrains of knowledge. One of the many learned societies formed was the Syrian Society of Arts and Sciences (alJam‘iyya al-Su-riyya li-l-‘Ulu-m wa-l-Funu-n). Founded in 1847 it included among its membership leading Arab scholars and intellectuals, six American missionaries and the Prussian Consul General Shultz and his dragoman Catafago. The Society was headed by several non-Arab members, including Dr William Thompson, its inaugural president and later Dr Eli Smith. The renowned Arab scholar and linguist But.rus al-Busta-nı- (1819–1883) was its secretary. In 1852, Dr Eli Smith, the then president of the Society, spoke in his annual address about the general aspirations of the Society and its standing among similar societies in Europe and America: Our Society, now, is certainly bold in appearing among these distinguished Societies, as a younger sister; and we know that being the people we are, we have no claim to be greeted, only that true science is a stranger to pride, and ever extends a helping hand to all those who love it, even its feeble and erring votaries. Already, indeed, have we seen Societies in Germany, France, and America, making mention of our Society in terms, which strengthen our resolution, and confirm our hopes. The German Oriental Society has favoured us, also, with the present of a copy of its Journal, which it sends to us as it comes out, together with some other valuable books. But it is the object of all these Societies, as is well known, to enlarge the boundaries of the sciences, or to carry the arts to a higher perfection; and what assistance can we render in a work so zealously prosecuted, as we see, by many of the most distinguished learned men of the world? That our number is small, our knowledge circumscribed, and our means restricted, is obvious. Yet we need not abandon hope, and throw off all concern in this matter; for the genius of your native country,

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and of the race from which you are sprung, and of the language, which you speak, is suited, we think, to encourage you, and to give you aid. (al-Busta-nı- 1990) It is in this genuine cross-cultural collaborative spirit that the concept of tanz.-ım as ‘design’ was born. In the Orientalist and postcolonial discourses these societies were presented as agencies of imperialism, and the relationships were condemned as hegemonic and Euro- or Western-centric. This might be so from a certain point of view, however, from an alternative and more constructive perspective, Arabs and Westerners can be seen as being engaged in a genuine collaborative enterprise, the main aim of which is the advancement of sciences and the arts. Of course, not all Arabs and Ottomans embraced this engagement wholeheartedly; however, the main thrust of the period was motivated by this partnership. In its rather sudden openness to the great influx of European ideas in arts and sciences, the Arab world faced serious deficiencies in technical terminology in the nineteenth century. With the drive for new modes of knowing lexical studies became popular among Arab intellectuals and scholars (Sawaie 1999). Journals and magazines proliferated as new media to spread the modern ideas and values among the intellectuals and wider public. Arab and Ottoman reformers were explicit about their desire of being partners of and contributors to the trends of modernisation. Early on in the Arab–European encounter – with the modernising initiatives of the Governor of Egypt, Muhammad Ali – the Italian and French languages had the strongest influence on modern education in Egypt, especially in the fields of military science, medicine and engineering. Nineteenth-century Egyptian historian al-Jabartı- (1756–1825), who witnessed the French invasion of and the growing Western presence in Egypt, described the establishment of the first School of Engineering, muhandis kha-neh, in 1816 (al-Jabartı- 1998, vol. 4, p. 397). He referred to a certain Hussein Çelebi ‘Ajwa, a designer and inventor, whose creative work prompted the Governor Muhammad Ali to establish the School. Hussein Çelebi ‘Ajwa designed an improved and more efficient technique to sift the rice crop than the one being used, and showed a model of his design to the Governor, seeking his support to build the new device. Impressed by the design, the Governor provided adequate support to build two rather than one. Al-Jabartı- did not use the term tas.mı-m when describing Hussein Çelebi’s ‘Ajwa’s design creativity; rather he referred to the act of designing as ‘inventing in his mind a form’ (ibtakara bi-fikrihi .su-ra) (al-Jabartı- 1998, vol. 4, p. 397). In the muhandis kha-neh that the Governor had established after this event, various sciences related to both architecture and engineering were taught, such as mathematics, measures and surveying. Among the teaching staff were many Franks, al-Jabartı- writes, and the Governor facilitated the School with ‘various engineering instruments made by the English, by which they were able to measure distances, heights, and areas’ (al-Jabartı- 1998, p. 397). European teachers in Egypt faced great difficulties in presenting new ideas and technical terms of modern arts and sciences in Arabic or Ottoman Turkish. Groups

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of Arab students were therefore sent to Europe, mainly to France, to enrich the local experience upon their return and foreign language schools were established to aid the process of Arabising modern sciences. Many new ideas and understandings rapidly emerged in the conceptual frames of European languages; the first French– Arabic dictionary appeared in 1828. It was conceived and compiled by an Egyptian Copt named Ellious Bocthor and published in Paris in two volumes.11 After the first muhandis khaneh of 1816 another was founded in Bu-la-q, Cairo, in 1834; both were closed in 1854 and were later reopened in 1858, but only to be closed again in 1861. In the short life after the second opening, one of the schools taught architecture. In 1866 a new school was founded to teach irrigation and architecture; the programme was developed in various phases until the founding of Cairo University in 1908, the subsequent establishment of the Faculty of Engineering in 1935, and the modernisation of architectural education in the following decades. In the various phases of muhandis kha-neh, architecture was formally taught by various local and European experts, one of whom was a teacher named Muh.ammad - rif. Muhammad Afandı- ‘A - rif wrote a four-part architecturally specific Afandı- ‘A . book titled Khula.sat al-Afkar fı Fann al-Mi‘ma-r (The Summary of Thoughts on the Architect’s Art). Written for pedagogical purposes, this was the first Arabic book formally dedicated to architecture, featuring the early efforts in the process of institutionalising both architectural and design education. The four parts were published in two volumes; the first appeared in 1315/1897 and the second in 1316/1898. The publication took place over ten years after the approval by the muhandis kha-neh’s Academic Committee on 26 January 1887 of the text to be included in its teaching programme. It was in this book that the word tas.mı-m appeared as an Arabic equivalent to the term ‘design’ in a formal didactic context for the first time. In the opening statement of the first part, Muh.ammad Afandı- ‘Arif (1315h [1897]) wrote: To reach knowledge of the two parts of the science of architecture (‘ilm al‘Ama-ra), which are ‘forming the designs of buildings’ (takwı-n tas.mı-ma-t al-abniya) and the ‘art of its construction’ (fann insha-’iha-), it is necessary to know the first two parts of this art, which are the material and techniques of architecture. (‘Arif 1315h [1897], vol. 1, p. 5) Of course, the book formalised what had been verbally taught to students for several decades, so the term tas.mı-m is likely to have been in circulation among certain circles - rif’s book was in the second half of the nineteenth century. Muh.ammad Afandı- ‘A predominantly technical and was concerned more with the making of architecture than the theorisation of design skills. With the institutionalisation of design education, and the appearance of the new term tas.mı-m along with the massive teaching manual that supports it, we have the early attempts for transforming design into a cognitive operation concerned with the formulation and manipulation of forms and meanings. Thus, in synchrony with Europe the professional identity of the Arab designer began to change from being a skilful maker to a trained thinker.

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In this historical process, the new professional identity of designers in general and architects in particular emerged in both Europe and the Arab–Ottoman world, more as a result of new shared ideas than hegemonic influences. The problems and opportunities of this transformation have become shared, as the two worlds have grown closer to one another. Of course, the specificity of different cultural contexts presents us with different conditions and challenges; however, there remains a degree of universality about some issues of global significance. The issue of social responsibility, for instance, is now high on the profession’s agenda in the Western world, requiring individual designers, before searching for form- and space-based design solutions for social problems, to change their professional habits by moving away from seeing their design tasks as an act of selfrealisation. This applies equally well to designers (mus.ammimı-n) in the Arab world. Whether they see themselves as makers or thinkers in their professional role, design can no longer continue to be seen primarily as an act of self-expression and self-fulfilment. The growing social and environmental problems have reached such a state of complexity that individual designers are no longer able to think or act alone. Not only that, but the political aspects of design have become equally important to the technical aspects for achieving sustainable futures (Fry 2011). Thus, a critical shift needs to take place, in education and in practice, to give priority to collective social and ecological short- and long-term consequences of designing. In this shift designers are required to reinvent themselves as effective makers of a sustainable future.

Notes 1 For more on this point, see Fry (1999). He wrote: ‘Design’s agency does not usually come from its being mobilised with a clear vision of consequences, but rather from its power as an unrecognised structural inscription’ (Fry 1999, p. 4). 2 I am not considering here the evolution of the concept of ‘design’ in the Ottoman Turkish context, which remained closely tied, linguistically and culturally, to the Arabic until the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and subsequent revolutionary changes by Kemal Atatürk in the early decades of the twentieth century. 3 Mayer (1956) on whose life and career there were several texts, remains an exception. On Sinan, see Crane and Akin (2006). 4 For a critique of this prevailing understanding, see Snodgrass and Coyne (2006). 5 Witty formal commentaries upon earlier conventions, as in the works of Charles Moore, Robert Stern and Michael Grave, or upon current social situations, and in the works of Peter Eisenman and Bernard Tschumi, became celebrated examples of architecture’s critical engagement with social and cultural issues (Ghirardo 1991). 6 Almost 20 years ago, renowned architect and academic Rafael Moneo wrote: Schools today are laboratories in which architectural ideas, and thus the future of the profession, are tested. That has not been the case in the past. Until recently, schools served as the means by which information about professional practice was disseminated and as the instruments for the propagation of ideas and concepts that had already been tested and experienced. See Moneo’s introduction in Hays and Burns (1990). 7 On the meanings of design, see Flusser and Cullars (1995) and Terzidis (2007).

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8 On ‘Form, Matter, and Instrument’, see Rasa-’il, vol. 1, pp. 278–280. 9 The seventh epistle, vol. 1, pp. 258–275; the eighth epistle, vol. 1, pp. 276–295. 10 The Ikhwa-n used what they termed as sharf al-s.ana-’i‘ (nobility of the arts/crafts) as criteria to distinguish between different professions and, to some degree, the social status of the people involved. The criteria are based on the necessity of the craft and nature of its subject matter. See Rasa-’il, vol. 1, pp. 287–290. 11 Despite its extensive coverage and sophisticated translations, Ellious Bocthor’s (1828) dictionary did not introduce the Arabic word tas.mı-m in any of the French terms associated with design, such as conception, concevoir, dessin, dessein, dessiner, désignation, désigner, plan or projet. Conception, concevoir were understood as being related to the process of conception (idra-k, fahm); désignation and désigner were understood as sign making (isha-ra), revealing (baya-n), and determining or marking precisely (ta‘yı-n); dessin, dessiner were rendered as drawing (rasm) and image making (tas.wı-r); dessein as aim and intention (mura-d, niyya). Even words like décider, decide, which could be rendered as tas. mı-m, were not translated as such in Ellious Bocthor’s dictionary. Instead the Arabic term jazm and qat.‘ were used. As for the term Architecte (qui possède et exerce l’art de bâter), this was translated as mi‘ma-r, banna’, and muhandis, and the term Architecture (art de bâter les édifices), was translated as ‘ilm al-bina-’ and ‘ama-ra.

References Alberti, L. 1989, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, trans. J. Rykwert, N. Leach and R. Tavernor, 2nd printing, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, original work published 1452. al-Busta-nı-, B. 1990, al-Jam‘iyya al-Su-riyya li-l-‘Ulu-m wa-l-Funu-n 1847–1852, Da-r al H . amra’, Beirut, pp. 23–24, trans. E. Salisbury 1853, ‘Syrian Society of Arts and Sciences,’ Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. 3, pp. 477–486. al-Jabartı- 1998, ‘Aja-’ib al-Atha-r fı--l-Tara-jim wa-l-Akhba-r, Da-r al-Kutub al-Mis.riyya, Cairo, vol. 4, p. 397. al-S.afa-’, I. 1376h (1957), Rasa-’il Ikhwa-n al-S.afa-’ wa Khilla-n al-Wafa-’, Da-r S.-adir, Beirut. ‘Arif, M. 1315h (1897), Khula-.sat al-Afka-r fı- Fann al-Mi‘ma-r, Bu-la-q, Cairo, vol. 1, p. 5. Ant.oun F. (ed.) 1899, Al-Ja-mi‘a al-‘Uthma-niyya (April), vol. 2. Bayly, C. A. 2004, The Birth of the Modern World 1780–1914. Global Connections and Comparisons, Blackwell, Oxford. Bocthor, E. 1828, Dictionnaire Français–Arabe, Chez Firmin Didot et Fils, Libraries, Paris. Crane, H. and Akin, E. 2006, Sinan’s Autobiographies: Five Sixteenth Century Texts, Brill, Leiden. Crawford, M. 1991, ‘Can Architects be Socially Responsible?’ in D. Ghirardo (ed.) Out of Site: A Social Criticism of Architecture, Bay Press, WA, p. 27. Flusser, V. and Cullars, J. 1995, ‘On the Word Design: An Etymological Essay’, Design Issues, vol. 11, no. 3, Autumn, pp. 50–53. Fry, T. 1999, A New Design Philosophy: an Introduction to Defuturing, UNSW Press, Sydney. Fry, T. 2011, Design as Politics, Berg, London. Ghirardo, D. (ed.) 1991, Out of Site: A Social Criticism of Architecture, Bay Press, WA. Hays, K. M. and Burns, C. (eds) 1990, Thinking the Present: Recent American Architecture, Princeton Architectural Press, Princeton, NJ. Le Corbusier, 1946, Towards a New Architecture, trans. F. Etchells, The Architectural Press, London. Mayer, L. 1956, Islamic Architects and their Works, Kundig, Geneva. Sawaie, M. 1999, Azamat al-Mus..talh. al-‘Arabı- fı- al-Qarn al-Ta-si‘ ‘Ashar, Institut Français de Damas, Damascus.

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Snodgrass, A. and Coyne, R. 2006, Interpretation in Architecture: Design as a Way of Thinking, Routledge, London. Terzidis, K. 2007, ‘The Etymology of Design: Pre-Socratic Perspective,’ Design Issues vol. 23, no. 4, Autumn, pp. 69–78. Therborn, G. 2003, ‘Entangled Modernities,’ European Journal of Social Theory, vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 293–305. Vitruvius. 1960, The Ten Books on Architecture, trans. M. Morgan, Dover Publications, New York. Weber, S. 2009, ‘Entangled Modernity. Multiple Architectural Expressions of Global Phenomena: the Late Ottoman Example,’ in M. Sadria (ed.) Multiple Modernities in Muslim Societies, I.B. Tauris: the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, Geneva, pp. 143–154.

4 TIMOR-LESTE Unlearning in order to be Tony Fry

As one of the newest nations in the world, and one that will not be familiar to some readers, a little needs to be said about Timor-Leste’s colonial and more recent past as a backdrop to looking at its present and questions of decoloniality. The Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste is a nation that emerged out of 500 years of colonial occupation and is now deeply embedded in the contradictions and complexity of resisting neo-colonial incursions. These as global corporations mobilise their economic power to ‘develop’ the nation’s offshore oil and gas resources. Geographically Timor-Leste is at the southern tip of Indonesia’s Lesser Sunda Archipelago, some 500 kilometres from Northwestern Australia. Its location is regarded by numerous powers as strategically significant in terms of ‘regional security’, its proximity to Indonesia, the value of its offshore gas and oil resources, and its location within an emergent ‘zone of risk’ (marked by the expansion of the Chinese Navy into the Pacific and the increasing USA military presence in Northern Australia).1 The nation is made up of the eastern half of the island of Timor, plus the islands of Atauro and Jaco as well as the district of Oecusse, an enclave within Indonesian West Timor. The aftermath of colonialism has left a huge number of health, sociocultural and economic problems for the nation to confront.2 Added to these are a degraded natural environment and an impoverished agricultural sector.3 Above all, poverty remains rife, and while material progress is being made, it is painful and slow. Notwithstanding all of this hardship – and a tragic history – the culture retains vibrancy and the form of its cultural development will be a key factor in the nation’s future.

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The homeland made a foreign country Timor-Leste has a population of around 1.2 million. Many are said to be descendants of Australoid and Melanesian people who arrived well over 40,000 years ago. There is also a history of more recent migration of proto-Malays from South China (now Northern Vietnam) who came 5,000 years ago. The claim of discovery is that Chinese traders visited the island to collect sandalwood during the 1330s. Then between 1509 and 1511 the Portuguese started to arrive, although the first documented date of landing is 1523 (Hägerdal 2012). However, Portuguese Timor was not officially named as such and designated as a Portuguese colony until 1702. The Timorese resisted the Portuguese.4 Then in 1642, Francisco Fernandes led a Portuguese military expedition to weaken the power of the Timor kings and to more firmly establish his nation’s presence. His force was made up of mostly Topasses (the local name for ‘black’ Portuguese mestizos) brought from the neighbouring island of Flores.5 The Topasses were of mixed Asian and African ethnicity and were a ‘ubiquitous’ class across all Portuguese colonies (Hägerdal 2012). They had been in Flores for a century or more prior to coming to Timor and we are told that they were the dominant Portuguese presence in the region until 1702. They became a law unto themselves and turned from being agents to adversaries of the Portuguese, including by driving the Governor out in 1705. Tensions continued for many years and culminated with a major conflict with white Portuguese in 1768 (Hägerdal 2012). While these events were unfolding the Dutch were consolidating a presence in Western Timor with a base in Kupang, which was established to counter Portuguese regional power. By the mid-eighteenth century the Topasses controlled central Timor from where they marched on Kupang. The Dutch won the ensuing battle and then expanded their control of Western Timor. In 1769 the Portuguese, after being exposed to more attacks from the Topasses, moved east from Lifau to establish themselves in Dili. The extant division of Timor is grounded in this history. The Portuguese, as well as the Topasses, exploited the island for its sandalwood resource (as had Chinese and Javanese traders in the fourteenth century). Later, coffee became a significant cash crop and thus another source of revenue for the Portuguese. However, beyond their own immediate interests they neglected to invest in the island. In fact Portugal used the colony as a dumping ground for ‘trouble makers’, political prisoners and ordinary criminals. The actual relation between the Timorese and Portugal is hard to fathom. Contrary to the contemporary benign view of Portugal, historically their rule was exploitative and at times brutal. By the end of the eighteenth century they were truly hated and the ambiguity of the relation to the Timorese continued well into the twentieth century. After Portugal’s rapid withdrawal from Timor (abandonment), and other colonies in the wake of its revolution in 1974, the proto-nation declared itself independent on 28 November 1975.

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But nine days after Portugal’s departure, Indonesian troops invaded by air and sea, well-equipped by the USA – notwithstanding protests from the Australian people, who had, and still have, an affinity with the Timorese people remembering their heroic actions during the Second World War (what was and is remembered is that Australian and Dutch troops, together with Timorese guerrillas, resisted the Japanese invasion). The Timorese ended up fighting on their own and in the region of 60,000 Timorese fighters lost their lives during this conflict. After the defeat of Japan, Portuguese Timor was handed back to Portugal. To its shame, and the ire of the people, the Australian government failed to react to Indonesia’s invasion. The reason for this, it has been suggested, was the discovery of oil in the Timor Sea between Indonesia and Australia, as well as the close economic links being forged at the time between Australia and the corrupt Suharto government (McDonald 1980). The invasion resulted in the former Portuguese colony being incorporated as a province of Indonesia. Twenty-five years of armed resistance ensued. The estimate of the Commission for Reconciliation (CAVR) was that nearly 190,000 lives were lost between 1975 and 1999, from what was a population of less than one million at that time. On 30 August 1999 a UN-sponsored referendum was held and an overwhelming majority of the people voted for independence from Indonesia. Immediately after the referendum pro-Indonesian militias were formed and were supported by the Indonesian military. What followed was the destruction of the majority of the country’s infrastructure and many homes. The militias also killed approximately 1,400 Timorese and forced 300,000 people into West Timor as refugees. A significant number of refugees were also taken to camps in Portugal. Many other people become IDPs (internally displaced persons). On 20 September 1999 the Australian-led International Force for East Timor (INTERFET) – a force of nearly 10,000 peacekeepers – was deployed and brought the violence to an end. The INTERFET deployment ended on 14 February 2000 with the transfer of military command to the UN. During this period a UN-administered transition period was established. On 20 May 2002 Timor-Leste gained its independence. Between June 2006 and March 2007 there were new outbreaks of violence caused by political instability (especially between rival gang and disaffected troops and the police), and on 11 February 2008 President José Ramos-Horta was critically injured in an attempt on his life. In the same incident an effort to assassinate Prime Minister Xanana Gusmão was also made, but he survived unharmed. The attempt to kill two of the nation’s leaders was apparently the start of what was a failed coup led by Alfredo Reinado, a renegade soldier who died in the attack. During these conditions of instability Australian troops again had been sent to the country, this following a request from the Government of Timor-Leste to the Australian Government in 2006 creating a multi-national security force (called the International Stabilisation Force) to assist with peace keeping within East Timor. Although the UN presence ended in 2012, a reduced number Australian troops remained. They left the country in 2013.

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Languages of culture and colonisation6 If there are places more linguistically complex than Timor-Leste they are few. Linguists tell us that there are 19 indigenous languages spoken in the nation (one of which is under threat of extinction) and perhaps 16 dialects (Taylor-Leech 2007). Added to this are the imposed languages of colonialism. Portuguese is the official language of government, while Tetum is that of the everyday. What globalisation has brought is the language of international economics: English. Prior to 1975 people were schooled in Portuguese, then in Bahasa Indonesian post-1975 (which, while taught in the schools, was also mobilised against the dominant indigenous language, Tetum). After 2000 Tetum regained its status. These issues of language also continue to pose challenges for families, national dialogue and government as well as the education system (not least in the production of textbooks). Language clearly is not just about communication; it is also about power. Portuguese was not just the language of the coloniser, it was also the language of their institutionalised religion and law. As such it became the main means to establish a hegemonic culture that negated the indigenous. Historically, this clash took on several forms, like the clash between Portuguese and the indigenous languages being transposed to that between Catholicism and Animism. What Animism asserts is that spirit is an ontological category vested in ‘the Earth’ and embodied within material organic or inorganic substances: a rock, a colonial military relic, a pig and so on. So understood, spirit can move into things and things into spirit (the complexity of this relation extends beyond things and thus remains an area of anthropological research). The soul, the spirit of ancestors, the live and the dead all play a key role in Timorese Animism, as does the Earth as a locus of the collective dwelling of all spirits and the essence of being. All things deemed sacred, by dint of them in some way being touched by spirit, are designated as lulik, which as a vector of spirit can protect or threaten, save or destroy (again this is a complex polysemic concept as anthropologist David Hicks has made clear7). The sacred house, the uma lulik, which houses things lulik, is the focal point of the community of believers. At a very basic level it can be seen that Catholicism and Timorese Animism both share ‘giving significance to’ a sacred building and sacred objects therein. This is just one reason why large numbers of Timorese people could accommodate both systems of belief at the same time. The fusion is thus not nearly as strange as it might first appear, and certainly the Catholic Church managed to take advantage of the apparent confluence. Overlaying all of the complexity of spiritual beliefs and practices is something absolutely fundamental and universal, which is, as anthropologist Roy Rappaport elaborates at great length, ritual and religion being major cultural agents in the ‘making of humanity’ (Rappaport 1999). Bringing this understanding to the issue of language and power during the period of Indonesian occupation we can see how the picture changes. To attack the language and system of belief was to attack the very being of the nature of Timorese human being. That the Timorese have now been able to learn to live, politically and in many cases

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literally, alongside Indonesia and Indonesians attests to the quality of humanity in full recognition that, to establish its hegemonic position, Indonesia waged war on Timorese culture. What this cultural aggression meant was that cultural artefacts were destroyed and many sacred houses were burnt. At one level this was simply about the destruction of the old, and its mythology, in order for the imposed new to arrive. But at another level it was deeply implicated in the attempt to break the ‘spirit’ and the will of people who were once again resisting being colonised. However, as just indicated, at an even more fundamental level, what was perhaps being contested was the form of the human itself. Consider: Indonesia is the world’s largest Muslim nation, and one of the fundamental propositions of the Islamic faith is that the human being is the servant of Allah on Earth. This, in contrast to the Western and secular notion of the human being, to use Hannah Arendt’s term (following Aristotle’s concept of the zoon politikon), as political animal (Arendt 1958). So would the combination of Catholicism and Timorese Animism not have looked like an abomination to many of the Indonesian occupying forces? The linguistic complexity of Timor-Leste has created a very multilingual nation (but one with still a too high level of illiteracy, especially among women). In just one family grandparents, parents and children all share a common language while each member has been formally educated in a different language. Life is not just lived in this borderland of translation but Tetum itself is a fusion of indigenous tradition. Meanwhile the epistemological colonisation carried out by Portuguese culture continues as a source of concepts of the modern unavailable in Tetum. This was reached back for, recovered, with the exit of the Indonesian invader and institutionally reinscribed as the means to engage the modern world. Doing this was not merely a reflex within the nation but the result of transnational agents of governance imposing their will in the name of technical assistance.

Lubricating the modern Oil has been the seal of Timor-Leste’s modern fate. It has shaped the events of its recent history, and brought nations from around the world to the country. The USA, China, Korea, Brazil, Japan and the European Union are some of the ‘big players’ who have staked a claim in the place. Oil will determine the economic future of the country for the next few decades; but oil income arrives with problems. Here is the opening of an exposé by Four Corners, an ABC TV current affairs programme that was aired in Australia in October, 2012: ‘East Timor’s one big roll of the dice, its one way out of extreme poverty was to buy a future for its people with massive seabed oil and gas reserves, which might last 20 years or more.’ But what the government did not see coming was being locked into a huge battle with the international corporations with whom they were partners to get to their fair share of the returns of the revenue. Four Corners exposed some of the sleights of hand that the corporations attempted and the ‘sophisticated arsenal developed by one of the world’s poorest countries to recoup hundreds of millions of dollars in back taxes’

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that it had attempted to withhold from them. The two corporations that featured in the programme were Woodside Petroleum and ConocoPhillips – both declined to be interviewed on camera. The programme made it clear that the nation was being short-changed. Around 90 to 95 per cent of the national budget comes from oil, so when the oil companies fail to pay the three billion dollar tax debt they owe, it’s a big blow. As Prime Minister Xanana Gusmão said at the end of the programme: ‘I believe that companies will be aware that they have to pay. Under the rules, under the laws they have to pay the tax’.

Modernity, neo-colonialism and decoloniality One can stand on a street in Dili, or in a rural town or a village in any of the nation’s 13 districts and watch the past fade and the cheap plastic future of bargainbasement modernity arrive. Here is an aesthetic of disjuncture. Two examples: somehow the cultural value of plastic flowers has erased the value of the naturally grown flowers and can be seen in vases gracing tables at every level of society. The second example: once villagers made small clay cups that after use were thrown to the ground, stepped on and the clay returned to the earth. Now plastic cups are thrown to the ground by their user, stepped on and left to form, in words borrowed from Walter Benjamin’s ninth thesis on the ‘Philosophy of History’ (Benjamin 1973, pp. 259–260) a ‘pile of debris … that grows skyward’. Here is the micro-reality of the underside of modernity that creates the ‘storm’ that ‘irresistibly propels’ the nation’s population ‘into the future’. So as a ‘flâneur’ standing on the seeming quietude of an anywhere street, one finds oneself amid that storm that ‘we call progress’. In the face of this situation the call to be made is not for an impossible and nostalgic return to what is lost – after all, as has been shown, there is no romantic or idyllic past to reinstate. Rather, what exists (but only for a while) is a ‘standing reserve’ of a material culture in distress that can, as we shall see, be partly recovered to contribute to forming a counter-futuring decolonialising material practice.

Life in the storm of the everyday By the measure of the Western way of life Timor-Leste is not modern. Yes, there are cars on the streets of Dili, some modern buildings and one shopping mall, the Internet is there, so is Facebook, and there are a few cash-strapped universities and so on and on. But the nation’s infrastructure – like power, water, sanitation, roads, transport, industry – is extremely poor, or broken or lacking. There is no worldclass (or even regional-class) hospital (those who can afford it go to Darwin, Jakarta or Singapore for treatment) and the education system is still very basic. Certainly the government is working to improve the situation, but its means are limited and its imagination constrained; the agenda of decoloniality has hardly surfaced. In

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conventional economic terms the retail sector is underdeveloped, the entertainment sector is almost non-existent, tourism is in its infancy (and lacking support services). But what is really absent is a vision of how things could be other than they are everywhere globally. Which is to say that what really begs being thought about is a local agency of industry, tourism and entertainment (although things are happening in the development of indigenous creative industries). Timor-Leste does have the potential to become a more sustainable, interesting, economically viable place to live, work and visit. Of course, at one level, the issue for government is basic: it needs to provide its people with peace and stability, liveable conditions, a decent diet, better health, a longer life expectancy, educational prospects, work, the means to develop their culture – this all in order to build a viable future for their nation. So said, the complex question is not just how to deliver this, but in what form? How, in the framing of the remarks above, can Timor-Leste be made futural and thus more culturally, economically, politically and environmentally sustainable? How can it lead, not follow? No claim is made here that these questions will be fully answered, but a contribution towards thinking them will be made.

Globalism’s designing Make no mistake, the institutions and culture of globalism are a powerful designing force. The World Bank, the Asia Development Bank, all UN agencies – they are all directive; notwithstanding rhetoric to the contrary, it is their way or no way. Whatever is delivered comes along with an inductive habitus (a taken-forgranted Eurocentric logic of capitalist development, an unquestioned conformity to international modes of governance, a recognition of the value of indigenous culture in its place). Whatever the aid, loans or investment gained there is always the designing resulting from the ‘strings’ attached, ‘unavoidable’ rules of compliance, the required ‘deliverable’, and the contractual requirements. And then again there is the performative ‘benchmarking from the elsewhere’. This can span anything from accounting to legal practice, and from manufacturing process to public health standards. The norm seems purely functional, ‘the standard’ the objective, and the processes are again directive. The design model rests with how the(ir) world should be, as predicated upon a globalist projection of conformity to the character and operation of a modern(ising) nation. More enveloping, more pernicious, indeed more powerful, is the omnipresence of televisual designing. This designing comes with the arrival of the sum of all visual electronic media within the modern world as they offer up the world of commodified desire. The dream, the utopia, the desire is not the acquisition of the thing itself – the plasma screen TV, the new car, motor boat, the dishwasher and so on – but what it in turn designs in terms of the sign value of ‘success’, ‘conspicuous consumption’, the semiotics of sophistication, and of course ‘progress’. In the end what televisual designing effectively does is to colonise the imagination with a ‘world picture’ (which is not an image of the world, but the world as image, that is

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the world of modernity) (Heidegger 1977, p. 134). At the most general, this world appears as a universal life-style based on globally standardised commodities (cars, televisions, cameras, suits, make-up, shoes, fridges and so on and on). Globalism brings the designing of ‘technological time’ – this is the time of a televisually shrunken world, the time of instant communication, of electronically transferred currency. What it does is devalue the time of difference vested in craft works, the growing of a crop, the learning of a skill, contemplative thought. What it designs is the demand for instant delivery, satisfaction, capability, pleasure, and as such it is the negation of time itself as time is essentially change and ‘the event in which things occur’ (Aristotle). So even if indigenous practices survive they so often become viewed as a trace of the past and as such move out of ‘the everyday’ into the spectacle. Finally in this only suggestive and non-exclusive summary of globalism’s designing is the designing of the world. This can be seen in Timor and all other places in the world in some way like it. This is the designing power of the adviser, the expert, that person who ‘knows more’ than the local, who is paid more than the local, who is better qualified than the local. This is the person, no matter their good intentions, who is an agent, a vector of epistemological colonialism as the importer of the qualitative norms of the elsewhere, the ‘better way of knowing’. The issue here is not an outright rejection of this Other, but a critical and selective appropriation from it and demand for equity. Therefore, it’s about the nature and conditions of exchange. It’s about the revalorisation of what has to be discovered (often being the same as that which should have never been devalued).

Borderlands The urban in Timor-Leste is not an exclusive locus of dwelling. A person may live and work in one of the nation’s few urban environments, but is not where they feel they belong. It is not where they see their fundamental cultural obligations to be lodged. Rather it is ‘the village’ which is the place of belonging, the ‘spiritual home’ and the key to a person’s cultural identity: ‘you are where you are from’. The village is the locus of the kinship structure of the extended family, as this plays a central role in a person’s cultural life. The call of the village, and the duty of cultural responsibility to the community of families, is all powerful. It can override virtually all other obligations and ‘stop the modernising world’ in its tracks for a while. This makes the urban a borderland: a space between a place of origin and a place of responsibility; a space between tradition and its negation; the local and the global. Is this bond weakening? Perhaps. Can this process be stopped? Perhaps. Here is another struggle the nation faces, but this time without the adversary being clearly identified. Movement between the urban and the village is of course not just a matter of travel through space but equally it is one across time. To illustrate the point: it was not that many years ago, so the story goes, that the warriors of pre-modern mountain villages that were outside the urban economy attacked helicopter gunships

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with bows and arrows; likewise, for a young person in Dili with just a few dollars in their pocket, pleasure is watching a one-dollar DVD of the latest movie pirated from China, or chat time on Facebook; meanwhile in another time of the same time, this person’s family is living from subsistence farming in the village without power, running water or sewage. All of this is to say that the movement across space and time, as outlined, is in fact a movement between ontologies. It is living in the here, the there and the in-between. James C. Scott writes at length of the differences between lowland grain and rice growers and the mountain pastoralists (Scott 2009). The former are complicit with the formation of the state, the latter are in so many ways a society outside the state. His analysis has a particular purchase on the distant past, as illustrated by the anti-state conflict with the Topasses mentioned earlier. More recently there is the anti-colonial struggle against the state as seen with the Manufahi Revolt against the Portuguese of 1911–1912 (McWilliams and Traube 2011), in which between 15,000 and 20,000 lives were lost, and then of course there is the guerrilla war against Indonesian rule starting in 1975. A mobile resistance movement waged this quarter-of-a-century conflict with Indonesia with bases in the jungle and mountains. In common with nomadic warriors of the past across many cultures of Asia, these fighters equally were a society outside the state striving to liberate their land from its occupier. The contemporary nation of Timor-Leste, as well-recognised by its people, was born out of the success of this culture of resistance. It has been symbolically and politically central to the relation between the government and the people. This relation is embodied in Xanana Gusmão, the former leader of the resistance and now, at the time of writing, serving his second term as Prime Minister.

Border thinking in the making Coloniality created its elites. In the period of a few decades before and then after the Indonesian occupation there were small numbers of Timorese educated in Portugal, Indonesia and Australia. This practice continues. Moreover, with the establishment of the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste a significant number of these overseas-educated people returned to the country, some to work in the newly established public service, with a smaller number becoming elected members of government. These elites are deemed necessary for the nation to function in the global order of finance, trade, politics and diplomacy. For the same reasons, a Eurocentric model of governance was introduced; this was a fact prefigured by the international diplomatic offensive developed during the Indonesian occupation as a part of the struggle for liberation. Yet this situation established an ongoing issue of governance between tradition and modern rule and law (Ospina and Hohe 2002). Some, but not all, politicians have had to learn/are learning how to traverse these two poles, moments of time, spaces and cultures. It is problematic and unavoidable. It needs to be recognised that traditional Timorese culture had its own longstanding mode of governance: at the ritual and spiritual level this was via the Liurai

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(the traditional kings and closed ‘aristocratic class’ whose members could not marry outside the ‘class’ and who ruled the symbolic domain); and at the political and pragmatic level, via the Chefe Suco (the village chief). The Portuguese incorporated/appropriated elements of Timorese cultural practice into their modes of political administration. By contrast the Indonesians did the reverse. In their war on Timorese culture not only did they attempt to destroy its material forms but, as mentioned, they also sought to break the people’s spiritual bond to the land (Hägerdal 2012). As Indonesian military records of 1978 showed, they relocated 372,921 people in ‘up to 150 camps, known as “settlement areas” (daerah pemukiman), that [sic] were established across the territory, with an average camp population of 2000 people’ (McWilliams and Traube 2011, p. 10). This was done so people could be more easily controlled than when they were dispersed across the country in villages.8 So while they did improve the nation’s infrastructure this won them no ‘hearts and minds’ and was done in large part for their own convenience. Even though there is, as acknowledged, a certain recognition of the problems of moving between tradition and the modern politically and inter-generationally, what is not getting publically recognised, as implied, is the lack of a sufficiently critical relation to Eurocentric knowledge by those elites educated outside the nation. Yes some contradictions are recognised but the predominantly instrumental mobilisation of the knowledge by the elites, together with overseas experts and advisors, is more felt (often as resentment) rather than confronted (as a problem). Out of the borderland between the cultures, and the inchoate border thinking of the few, one would hope that confidence would grow, and from it a new kind of knowledge would become constituted. But this assemblage, to become critical and able to form a new kind of local/global knowledge (equally a local/global synthesis), would need to directly link to the nation’s cultural community, and its history of cultural production and making. There are already elements of a latent assemblage – there are writers, poets, politically disposed artists and a nascent filmmaking industry. For this to happen there has to be a wider recognition of the rich and complex material (including craft) culture of Timor-Leste. It is central to the tangible and intangible heritage of the nation, all of which is under threat from globalism. What this demonstrates is not only local skills and an aesthetic of place, but a diverse reservoir of knowledge. This is especially evident, for example, in Timor’s weaving tradition (tais). For what this tradition produces combines: (i) skill; (ii) a nuanced aesthetic of encoded geographic and mythological information (in which the woven patterns are a certain kind of text); (iii) scientific knowledge on the chemistry of making dyes; and (iv) various ceremonial uses of the woven fabrics.9 Another design-related expression of the craft culture of the nation is architecture (Ruy 1965, 1987). Like the making of tais, the indigenous architecture of Timor has a specific aesthetic and combines multiple knowledge. In the case of the construction of an uma lulik – the sacred house – the knowledge, skills and efforts of men and women from the entire community are drawn upon. The building of the structure

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is not just a practical task and involves ritual at various stages. The materials for the structure come from grasslands, forests or jungle; their selection requires botanical knowledge, geographic knowledge and the skills of harvesting. Design and construction knowledge is vested with the local carpenter and other craft workers in the community. Building decoration can involve wood carvers and painters and again is directed by ritual and knowledge of a local symbolic language. The actual building design has to conform to a local traditional style and rules of construction. For example, the lengths and positioning of major structural posts are designated with symbolic as well as practical importance, their erection in male and female pairs being marked ceremonially. Likewise the position of a building within the compound(s) of a hamlet or village also conforms to a pre-given design format. While a lot of destruction and damage was done to indigenous architecture during the Indonesian occupation, significant examples remain. A good deal of the design and construction knowledge survives within communities and now a number of uma luliks that were burnt during this period have been rebuilt. Crucially this tradition can and should also be viewed as a creative resource to inform the bringing of a contemporary Timor architecture into existence not as a derivative of the old but as a foil and echo of it. At this point it is worth acknowledging that technological nous and resource pragmatics of many Timorese people. While in part a product of innovation by necessity, it is also more than this. It reflects a kind of experientially grounded, acquired empirical knowledge – a learning by observation and doing. While not unique to Timor, it is of great developmental importance and not confined to purely the technical. While its methods and results are often not ‘pretty’, it is a vital survival skill that huge numbers of people in the privileged West have lost. It is especially important in the situated recovery of knowledge via an encounter with old things and a resourcefulness that has future-sustaining potential. Effectively, cultural production in the making of ‘things’ material and immaterial is a form of futuring that wrests power from the domination of the inductive global flow of commodities. It is a taking back of and a moving forward to control the everyday. As such it is demonstratively political and this has agency beyond things in themselves. Thus a new local architecture and revitalised craft practices are not simply other than global commodities but are actual and nascent sites of resistance to globalism, this in the production of knowledge, perceptions and counter-desires to the global erasure of difference. Local crafts, architecture, music, dance, film, fashion, all of which have beginnings in Timor, are thus not just pathways to the revitalisation of cultural development, but equally means to advance a social ecology that extends freedom of independent thought and action. They are means to heal the wounds of a damaged nation.

Turning culture It was against the backdrop of cultural destruction, social and economic need and cultural regeneration that the idea of forming a Timor-Leste ‘creative industry’

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was conceived in 2009. The key to the realisation of the idea was centred on three fundamental propositions. The first was to make a local creative industry a means to resist the encroachment of the global creative industry, which means it was about developing Timorese culture and exporting it regionally and beyond. The second was about identifying what of extant past and present Timorese culture (and cultural practices) should be conserved as heritage and what should be treated as objects available for design innovation. And the third was the establishment of an educational institution (an indigenous-based academy of creative arts and industry with a curriculum drawn from the nation’s cultural resources) to provide the educational material means to realise the prior two aims. The core of this institution would be built around design, craft, visual arts and music education and skills development prospectively over a three-year programme that would give pathway careers (like teaching the visual arts and design in schools, gaining paid employment as service providers or in setting up a small or micro business). In this respect the project directly addressed the crisis of unemployment of young men and women. At the same time it would provide the beginning of a critical education focussed on how to make sense of living and working in the complexity and challenges of the contemporary world (this in recognition that Timor cannot become an atavistic state or immune from the forces of globalism). To advance the idea of the local creative industry and the Academy a research project was established to create a comprehensive picture of all available cultural resources around which to build the curriculum. This was developed as a threeyear programme of fieldwork across all of the country’s 13 districts as well as a search in galleries and museums that had collections of Timor’s material culture (during the era of colonialism the amount of material taken out of the country was enormous and it was scattered world-wide, including a large collection of jewellery in Portugal). This work was conduced as a Griffith University project, with funding from the Australian Government overseas aid agency, AusAID, with a small local team managed by David Palazón, a Spanish designer–filmmaker working in Timor-Leste, and directed by myself. The result was as a major visual (stills and video) documentation of artefacts, images, buildings, events, music, dance, art and crafts people and publications. During the course of this work close relations were established (formalised in two Memorandums of Understanding) with the Government of Timor-Leste, especially the department of the Secretary of State for Culture. In July 2011 the Government formally announced its support not just for the Academy, but also for the model of creative industry it was based on, as elemental to its national economic development strategy. It did this in a major and amazing event hosted in Dili by the Prime Minister. Five thousand members of the public attended an outdoor concert of traditional and contemporary music and dance, supported by an exhibition and a fashion show. This was followed by a two-day conference of over 500 people from the nation’s creative community attending with presentations from international academic speakers with interest in Timor, international artists, local artists, filmmakers, designers and academics, as well as musicians

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and craft workers from villages. In mid-2012, on re-election, the Government adopted the project, with a two-year implementation process starting in January 2013. It is now fully under the direction of the department of the Secretary of State for Culture. Realising the project is hard, faces many challenges and is long term. But what it represents is a nation taking action against cultural erasure by globalism through the restoration of value to the heritage of its indigenous culture and by the development of forms of cultural innovation grounded in extending traditional forms, skills and knowledge as a means to create the ‘locally new’. All such action depends upon, and is a part of, Timorese people taking responsibility for the creation of a sustain-able future.10

Notes 1 The 2009 Australian Government Defence White Paper ‘Defending Australia in the Asia Pacific Century: Force 2030’, Canberra, noted that the combination of climate change, food shortages, booming population growth and mobility, public health crises, water shortage, poverty and competition over energy resources are all growing regional and global strategic issues which are projected to become significant by 2030. It should be noted that since 2009 the projections on the impacts of climate change have considerably worsened. The USA Department of Defense (2010) remarked that climate change ‘will play a significant role in shaping the future security environment’. It also said: While climate change alone does not cause conflict, it may act as an accelerant of instability or conflict, placing a burden to respond on civilian institutions and militaries around the world. In addition, extreme weather events may lead to increased demands for defense support to civil authorities for humanitarian assistance or disaster response both within the United States of America and overseas.

2

3 4 5

The UK’s Ministry of Defence, in its January 2010 edition of Global Strategic Trends made similar comments: ‘Climate change will amplify existing social, political and resource stresses, shifting the tipping point at which conflict ignites, rather than directly causing it.’ From these perspectives, and from its history, Timor-Leste can be viewed as a nation having the potential to be destabilised. It has one of the highest birth rates in the world, 80 per cent of the population is under 25 (and expected to double by 2050); the average family size is nine; infant mortality rates are still high (but falling); one in 200 mothers dies during childbirth; malnutrition is common; and around 70 per cent of the people under 25 are unemployed (this figure conceals the complexity of subsistence agriculture). The list continues: literacy levels are low (especially among women), the education system requires major improvement, there is a good deal of domestic violence, and the nation’s infrastructure is poor. See AusAID statistical data at www.ausaid.gov.au/countries/eastasia/timor-leste/Pages/ statistics-east-timor.aspx#general. When Indonesian troops started to leave in 1999 they took many power lines down. This meant that people stripped hillsides of wood for fuel, which led to significant increases of soil erosion. The Dutch also established a presence on the island, and this became a source of ongoing conflict. See East Timor Government website at http://easttimorgovernment. com/history.htm and Introduction in McWilliams and Traube (2011, pp. 1–22). Even though it is correct to say that they came from Larantuka, the easternmost part of Flores, they were originally from Solor. It was a mestizo community that rose,

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6 7

8

9 10

surrounding the fort of Solor built by Dominican priests. The Topasses were descendants of natives, merchants, soldiers and, most likely, priests from the Catholic mission. They were driven away from Solor together with the Portuguese by the Dutch after the conquest of the Solor fort in 1613. Then they established themselves in Larantuka. They were called by three names at that time: Topasses, Larantuqueiros (Portuguese word meaning ‘the people from Larantuka’) or ‘Black Portuguese’ by the Dutch. There is a classic study on the Topasses (Boxer 1947). The address to language here is informed by Kerry Jane Taylor-Leech (2007). It should be noted, however, that no absolutely consensual view exists on any issues of language. The categories sau and lulik are just such ‘key words’ in the Tetum language. Lulik can be translated as ‘to prohibit’, ‘to be prohibited’, ‘to be impeded (by rites or laws)’, ‘ceremony’, ‘animistic rite’, ‘that which is sacred, venerated, untouchable’, ‘prohibited’, ‘impeded’, and ‘holy’ and is used in innumerable verbal constructs such as buat lulik, ‘sacred thing’. Some dictionaries even translate the term as ‘witchcraft’, ‘magic power’, ‘enchantment’, and ‘pagan idol’, although these are misleading referents (Hicks 2004, p. 25). However, for these people, ‘no matter how much displacement they might experience, their relationships with the land, their place of origin and their place of residence are matters of utmost importance to all people, and no less so to people on the move’ (McWilliams and Traube 2011, p. 14). The consequence of people being displaced from or having to abandon their land, then on return striving to reclaim it, has caused massive legal problems, which continue. This craft is actually seriously threatened by machine-made tais from Bali that look the same but are made from synthetic fabrics and dyes – they are devoid of all local meaning, are of course a fraction of the price and aimed at tourists. Using the Timorese saying of ‘same, same, different’ here we note the Amawtay Wasi, Universidad Intercultural di los Publos y Naciones Indigenas del Ecuador (Tlostanova and Mignolo 2012).

I would like to thank my friends David Palazón and Alberto Fidalgo Castro for their comments and their comradeship.

References Arendt, H. 1958, The Human Condition, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. Aristotle, Physics IV, ch. 11, 219a ff., 1936, trans. W.D. Ross, Clarenden Press, New York. Benjamin, W. 1973, Illuminations, trans. H. Zohn, Fontana/Collins, London. Boxer, C. R. 1947, Koninklijke Vereeniging Indisch Instituut, Mededeling No. LXXIII. Hägerdal, H. 2012, Lords of the Lands, Lords of the Sea, KITLV Press, Leiden. Heidegger, M. 1977, ‘The age of the world picture’, in The Question Concern Technology, trans. W. Lovitt, Harper & Row, New York. Hicks, D. 2004, Tetum Ghost and Kin. Fertility and Gender in East Timor, Waveland Press, Inc., Long Grove, IL. McDonald, H. 1980, Suharto’s Indonesia, Fontana, Blackburn. McWilliams, A. and Traube, E. G. 2011, Land and Life in Timor-Leste: Ethnographic Essays, ANU E Press, Canberra. Ospina, S. and Hohe, T. 2002, Traditional Power Structures and Local Governance in East Timor: A Case Study of the Community Empowerment Project (CEP), Graduate Institute of Development Studies, Geneva. Rappaport, R. A. 1999, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Ruy, C. 1965, ‘Tipos de casas timorenses e un rito de consagración’ in Actas do Congresso Internacional de Etnografía (Vol. IV), Junta de Investigações do Ultramar, Lisbon.

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Ruy, C. 1987, ‘Leopolo de Almeida and Sousa Mendes’, Arquitectura Timorense, IICT/ Museu de Etnologia, Lisbon. Scott, J. C. 2009, The Art of Not Being Governed, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT. Taylor-Leech, K. J. 2007, The Ecology of Language Planning in Timor-Leste: A Study of Language Policy, Planning and Practices in Identity Construction, PhD thesis, Griffith University, Brisbane. Tlostanova, M. V. and Mignolo, W. D. 2012, Learning to Unlearn: Decolonial Reflections from Eurasia and the Americas, Ohio State University Press, Columbus, OH. US Department of Defense, 2010, Quadrennial Defense Review, Department of Defense, Washington, DC, p. 85.

5 URBAN DESIGN FOR THE GLOBAL SOUTH Ontological design in practice Paul James

Global South cities, like all contemporary cities, tend to be designed around a core modern configuration of asphalt, glass, concrete, cars and mobile citizens. Postcolonial modernisation has brought with it a mandatory system of major thoroughfares, often including a freeway, cutting through the cityscape from an international airport to a downtown area of concentrated semi-rise corporate buildings. It has ushered in traffic lights, roundabouts and private-property markets. It has re-ordered nature, determining the run-off directions of rainwater, the gradients of rising ground, and the courses of creeks. In summary, for all of the political gestures to social heritage, local nature and indigenous colour, and whatever the aesthetic content of the ensuing built-environment, the dominant design regime is predominantly abstract modern in its form. Urban design tends to remake nature with the modern neatness and cultural flatness of a computer-generated verge pattern. However sensitive to cultural difference various individual designers may be, urban planning as a regime tends to be technically and economically oriented, increasingly globalised and ontologically modern. Processes of globalisation, now most often enacted through local–national decisions and desires, have systematised the dominant layer of design outcomes, from the whole spatial configuration of the city down to the smallest, most taken-for-granted processes. Across the world, red–amber–green light-sequences and flashing lights screwed to the top of metal poles increasingly guide vehicle movement. Car-use dominates the urban landscape. Private-property boundaries determine land-use. And the capitalist market decides what is important. Globalised urban design is Janus-faced. It overwhelmingly works within a modernising paradigm of regularisation, risk-management and monitored efficiency, but it faces two directions at once. It looks out upon both new freedoms and new oppressions. Just as modern ideologies of liberal freedom and subjective autonomy are associated with objective figures of oppression, exclusion and displacement, so

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it is with modernising urban change. To the outskirts of many Global South cities come once-rural denizens, autonomously, freely, seeking work, only to find themselves squatting in the junk-filled interstices of the expanding built-environment. From within the bloating urban precinct, indigenous populations are given the freedom to assimilate or be pushed aside, at best into cultural reserves. In the city of Curitiba a Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system has become a global beacon of positive sustainability, but during the same period most of the indigenous population have been pushed out to live in zones well beyond BRT access. Three tribal groups, once living along the airport road have, since 2008, been relocated to Campo Santana, 25 kilometres from the city. Here they live in a forlorn camp of basic cementrendered bungalows. Be’er Sheva provides an even starker example. In the early part of the twentieth century the town was predominantly Arab Bedouin. In the 1950s a murky amalgam of Jewish Zionism and the celestial ‘Garden City’ concept, associated with Ebenezer Howard and his book Garden Cities of Tomorrow, became the basis for planning. Now the population of the city is 98 per cent Jewish or other non-Arab residents. The Bedouin market has been reduced to a quaint reminder of the past, relegated to a car park on the outskirts of the city (James 2010). Despite its dark side, there are positive rationalities to modern globalisation. Moreover, for all of their problems, and despite their built-in structural violence, some Global South cities offer rich possibilities for ontological redesign that most Northern cities have largely lost. As Eleni Kalantidou describes in Chapter 2 of this volume, such borderland possibilities are not just confined to the Global South, but it tends to be the case. This essay examines the ontological layers of the human communities who inhabit three illustrative Global South cities, and argues for a reconfiguration of urban form that reinvigorates the ways of life that tend to be marginalised or submerged beneath an increasingly dominant modern overlay. This re-imagining involves not a dismissal of modern ontologies per se, but rather a critique of the dominance of the modern, even with all its postmodern qualifications, and an argument for a different balance. A revolution is needed in how we consider cities, and this revolution will need to include but go deeper than advocating active street-frontage. A number of writers have argued that contemporary cities, rather than becoming just ‘spaces of abstract freedom’, need to be built in such a way as to encourage enriching forms of embodied friction. They argue that social life needs to return to the streets as more than simulated or commodified authenticity. Locals and strangers should rub shoulders, sometimes painfully, as they move through in locally defined places (Jacobs 1961; Sennett 1994; Zukin 2010). This chapter goes further in the same direction to argue for the deepening of reflexively understood ontological friction, that is, for the creative facilitation of positive and painful intersections of engagement, allowing for different ontological orientations to be present in the same place. This includes our relation to others and our relation to nature. The modern town square – Tahrir Square in Egypt, Taksim Square in Turkey, Tiananmen Square in Beijing or Shahbagh Square in Dhakar – might allow for strangers and locals to rub shoulders, and it might provide the setting for

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short-lived political revolutions, but the politics of the town square remains dominantly one-dimensional. Designing for creative ontological friction entails building cities in a way that explicitly and reflexively recognises ontological difference across different social formations, such as between relations of customary tribalism, cosmological traditionalism, constructivist modernism and relativising postmodernism, as well as ontological friction across the social/natural divide. It is not just, for example, that urban spaces should facilitate people rubbing shoulders. It is also that design should explicitly take into account the different ontological meanings that rubbing shoulders have for different people. Here Tony Fry’s concept of ontological design comes to the fore (2012; Chapters 1 and 4, this volume). It is the organising concept of this chapter, though it is developed here with a different but complementary inflection from the original conception. As the concept is used here, engaging in ontological design is defined as working explicitly in terms of what it has meant and still means to be human with all our frailties and limitations: that is, human in relation to other humans, to objects, to nature and to categories of social being, including time, space, embodiment, epistemology and performativity. To take this argument a step further we need first to acknowledge the distinction between ontological design and designing with ontological consequences. All design has ontological consequences. All cities have, in different senses, been made by design, including through design that is ontologically framed. Specifically in the cases that are discussed in this chapter and other cities discussed in this volume, Global South cities were made by ‘modern’ colonial and postcolonial design, overlaying and tending to relegate customary and traditional ways of being to the margins (Mignolo 2000; Chapter 10, this volume). However, reflexively taking up ontological design is different from having one’s design practices either framed by ontological considerations or having unintended ontological consequences. Ontological design is by definition active and reflexive. It requires changing the way in which a designer approaches social and natural life. Practitioners who work with ontological design sensitivities and principles, self-consciously begin from where they are now, with ‘the modern’ as the ontologically dominant paradigm for practice on this planet, and slowly begin to qualify, question and challenge those dominant sensibilities. This involves ranging across different ontological orientations. Here, difference is not drawn upon as pastiche, but as deeply constraining. The spatial orientation of a building can be designated for postmodern reasons: orientated in such a way that it draws attention to its orientation aesthetically, playfully. It can be aligned for modern reasons: oriented in relation to the movement of the sun for rational and ecologically sensitive sustainability reasons. It can be traditionally designed, oriented to the sun as homage to a cosmological truth about solar movement, or it can be customarily designed: oriented to the sun because all human constructions are an expression of the natural– social world, of which the sun is crucial. In understanding these differences, ontological design does not treat nature as ‘given’. It does not plunder difference for mere design motifs. Rather it works by

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negotiating meaning across different ontological formations. When the designers of the still-unbuilt city of Dongtan near Shanghai proposed an alignment of the city’s canals with the movement of the wind and sun, they properly brought together both modern sustainability principles and the local traditional principles of fengshui, literally translated as ‘wind and water’. The fact that this design is yet to be constructed may be due to the exigencies of current modern structures around the relation between cost and design. Ontological design that is more than gestural is bound to be difficult, slow and take considerable consultation; all expensive considerations. By comparison, when one designs within an ontological frame, it is usually because that frame is taken for granted and dominant. Such design allows dominant relations of power to do their ‘own’ work. When Frank Gehry designed the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao he was working off the current dominant intersection in architecture of modern engineering requirements and postmodern sensibilities. His building came into architectural contention as representative of an emerging cultural dominance, and therefore famously was economically successful. When, in the early nineteenth century, Edward Gibbon Wakefield designed a system for parcelling and measuring land across the British Empire, he was working within the singular modern frame of rationalised spatiality and commodified settlement that was remaking the globe. His system raged across the world as the new way of doing things. Similarly, when, in the first century BCE, the Roman designer Vitruvius translated the figure of the human body into the architecture of a temple, he was linking the human and the cosmos within a broad traditional ontological frame. This approach reached across the Roman Empire, carried by intellectuals and soldiers. Each of these design modes had their own consequences, some good, many oppressive. Ontological design, by comparison, is aware of the power of these different frames and considers their inter-relation when planning and enacting future places. As Brendan Gleeson (2012, p. 8) writes: ‘This is to oppose the naturalistic roots of determinism, accepting that homo urbanis has not fortified itself beyond nature or achieved a law-bound compact with its evolutionary possibilities.’ This is more than can be said for the latest wave of urban theory. The latest gurus of urban development remain in enthral of market-based ‘progress’ as the ever-upward facilitator of cultural vibrancy and ecological sustainability. Even our dominant metaphor of sustainability, the almost always-used phrase ‘economic, environmental and social sustainability’, carries a hidden weight beneath its triple-bottom-line obviousness. Ontological design asks why, since the beginning of the nineteenth century, has economics escaped its grounding in the social domain? Why is it that environment is an externality of economics, rather than a domain of social life – ecology – that is both constraining and enabling of human activity? Ontological design is a nascent practice that implies a paradigm shift in the theory and practice of architecture, urban design and design in general; it cannot be appealed to as if it were an independent agency or off-the-shelf method. It requires the ontological transformation of us as designers. This essay proceeds

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by first outlining an approach to ontological difference. It goes on to paint some rough pictures of the various ontological intersections in three Global Cities, Port Moresby, Dili and Johannesburg. This is done in ways which intentionally emphasise problems and contradictions; to set the scene for the last section of this chapter: a discussion of how, using Port Moresby as an example, the city might be configured differently and more positively.

Different valences across different ontological formations Establishing the foundations of ontological design requires attention to basic ontological categories, that is, fundamental categories of existence and how they are lived across human history. For the purposes of establishing a starting point, we use the terms of the ‘constitutive abstraction’ approach, a form of ‘engaged theory’ that begins with the ontological categories of space, time, embodiment, knowing and performing as foundational to being human (James 2006). Each of these terms summarises the very different ways in which we live spatially and temporally as embodied persons, performing sociality in relation to others and nature, and knowing in different ways what it means to do so. The concept of ‘ontological formations’, or ‘ways of being’, is intended to name different formations in which a particular set of orientations or valences to basic categories of being, such as temporality and spatiality, frame the dominant practices and meanings of social life. Ontological formations are not treated as ideal types. Neither are they understood as standalone formations, at least not across the period since humans first encountered each other as culturally bounded groups and began to interconnect their mythological explanations. Ontological formations are treated as formations-in-dominance. In the contemporary world they are co-existent and therefore co-temporal. The present engaged-theory approach works with four such formations: the customary (including the tribal), the traditional, the modern and the postmodern. A customary formation is defined by the way that analogical, genealogical and mythological valences come to constitute different social practices – production, exchange, communication, organisation and enquiry – in relation to basic categories of existence: time, space, embodiment, performance and knowledge. Here the term ‘valence’ comes from the Latin valentia, meaning strength or capacity. The concept comes to social theory via the field of chemistry, in which from the nineteenth century it has been used to refer to the ‘combining power of an element’. More recently it has been used in psychology to express an orientation. In this chapter, the concept of ‘valence’ is used to suggest a social orientation. The three defining valences of customary relations – analogy, genealogy and mythology – have been chosen because they arguably give a minimal sense of the complexity of customary formations. They have overlapping consequences, but they can be analytically distinguished. Speaking broadly, these valences are foundational for the human condition, even today, albeit overlaid, reconstituted and subordinated by more abstracted valences.

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Analogical relations as a characteristic of a customary formation, an orientation, has its primary embedding in the relation between the natural and the social, or what is more poetically known in the literature as the ‘nature–culture’ contradiction. Here the social and the natural are treated as analogical to each other. With this valence there is no sense in which the natural has been lifted out as a separate sphere of life. Here the sun is a natural/social being. It is not just an object that emits electromagnetic radiation and requires that buildings are oriented this way or that in order to maximise winter light. Nature as lived through this valence is confronting, animated, palpable and part of every human activity. Nature is not just the context for a shadow map on to which the late-afternoon light-effects of a building are projected. It is more than a green-space allocation that provides space for a Sunday picnic, or even a bush track that affords a well-considered nature walk. The second customary valence, genealogy, is primarily grounded in the relation between birth, becoming and mortality. It emphasises embodied relations and their consequences for ongoing connection even after death. In terms of this valence, birth is not confined to maternity wards and dead bodies are not shuffled off to distant or separated zones of the city surrounded by evergreen trees. A third customary valence, the mythological, is primarily expressed in the relation between social practice and oral expressions of what that practice means: stories and images. Stories become mythologies that create and reproduce meaning. Mythologies are told and retold, including through the fabric of the buildings and paths. As Victoria Stead describes the relationship to land with the intersecting dominance of these valences: land is approached through the relationships, histories and migrations of past, present and future kin. Far from a fixed, bounded and enclosed area, land is itself an assemblage of features, objects, marks, stories, materials, spirits, pathways, sites and meanings that are both (to employ a modernist language) ‘social’ and ‘natural’. (Stead 2013, p. 160) By comparison, a traditional formation is defined by the way in which analogical, genealogical and mythological valences are drawn into a cosmological and metaphorical reframing of different social practices: production, exchange, communication, organisation and enquiry. As always, and to the extent that we remain human, this occurs in relation to the basic categories of existence: time, space and so on. In societies dominated by traditional ways of life, the secondary valences of the cosmological and metaphorical tended (and tend) to be lived in conjunction with each other. It is only possible philosophically to separate out or define the terms of these valences of social life; and it is to this end that traditional and early modern philosophers have been devoted for centuries. Across the history of designing cities through traditional valences, the social/natural analogy has been abstracted into principles (even mathematical translations) for making natural spaces into crucibles for embodied social life, unifying the city and the countryside (Hall

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1998). Richard Sennett beautifully describes the relation between flesh and stone in the imperial Roman city: To start a city, or refound an existing city wrecked in the process of conquest, the Romans tried to establish the point they called the umbilicus, a centre of the city approximating the human navel; from this urban belly button the planners drew all measurements for spaces in the city … The planners also pinpointed the umbilicus of a city by studying the sky. The passage of the sun seemed to divide the sky into two; other measurements of stars at night seemed to cut this division at right angles, so that the heavens were composed of four parts. To found a town, one sought on the ground a spot that reflected directly below the point where the four parts of the sky met, as if the map of the sky were mirrored on the earth. Knowing its centre, the planners could define the town’s edge; here they tilled a furrow in the earth called the pomerium, which was the sacred boundary. (Sennett 1994, pp. 107–108) However, this is design with ontological consequences rather than ontological design. It does not have a positive and reflexively understood place to stand and qualify its own power as it projects itself onto the built-environment. What traditional design achieved in many ways was magnificent. As a person walked the street, the stones cried out the natural/social meaning of all being, even the direction in which they walked. However, in many circumstances it also had horrific consequences for the oppressed. Roman design depended on hubris, based on the belief that before a space was conquered and redesigned, little existed of cultural– political value in that original landscape. Roman imperial design was far from design ex nihilo – Nature, God(s) and human embodiment limited the terms of sacred geometry – but it did foreshadow the doctrine of terra nullius that modern colonising settlement was to bring to the fore. A partial break with the dominance of traditional valences came with the sense that designers could construct an urban landscape out of their own sense of what was right and good. In the constitutive abstraction approach, the modern is defined by the way in which prior valences of social life, analogical, genealogical, mythological, cosmological and metaphorical relations, came to be reconstituted through a constructivist reframing of social practices in relation to basic categories of existence common to all humans, including temporality and performativity. In constructivist terms, these basic categories of human existence become the terrain of different projects to be made and remade. Activities become projects to be thought and rethought anew. Bodies, landscapes, buildings, cities, genome systems, aesthetic principles and political systems all become projects for construction and reconstruction. Although, for a time, designing towns was developed with long-term utopian commitments, more recently urban design has become increasing reduced to making one’s mark on a zone marked by a thousand competing projects. Similarly, for a time, economics was seen as a social domain of life, but it

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increasingly became lifted out as the dominant domain of progress and development, including urban development. A further ‘break’, within often-unacknowledged but strong continuities, came with the subjectivity and practice of relativising the meaning of all things, including the meaning of relatively stable ontological categories such as time and space. This sense of the postmodern is defined by the way in which prior valences of social life, analogical, genealogical, mythological, cosmological, metaphorical and constructivist valences, are reconstituted through a relativist reframing of social practices in relation to basic categories of existence common to all humans. In these terms, basic categories of the human are all open for deconstruction. In postmodern politics, for example, projections of alternatives are constantly relativised and displaced. Constant deconstruction is considered a virtue. The built-environment becomes a place for disrupting taken-for-granted assumptions and patterns of doing things.

Pictures of some Global South cities Dominant formations notwithstanding, designing all cities, formally and informally, historically and now, is in practice fused with slow increment and unintended consequences. This happens in ways that make it difficult to separate out the intended and the contingent, let alone the layers of ontological difference that lie beneath the now dominant modern urban configurations we call ‘global cities’. The designers, planners, architects and builders who have contributed to the prevailing urban form we have today knew what they were trying to do with the patches of ground upon which they worked. They wanted to bring elements of clarity and usefulness into what was previously limited, undeveloped, backward and messy. The designers of Port Moresby, Dili and Johannesburg may not have had the grand modern planning pretensions of Georges-Eugène Haussmann in Paris or Robert Moses in New York, but they were building for a certain kind of future: nationally directed, globally connected, oriented to capitalist productivity, and keen on enhancing spatial mobility. The year 1975 provides a point of historical comparison.

Port Moresby In 1975, Port Moresby became capital of an independent Papua New Guinea. Originally the low-rise administrative centre for an Australian colonial government, it was not until after independence with the departure of most of the Australians that Melanesians became the majority of the city’s population. One planning commentator romantically described Port Moresby as ‘an Australian town frayed at the edges’ changing into a postcolonial Melanesian city (Oram cited in Goddard 2010a, p. 2). In design terms, the reality was that the Melanesian customary layer of the city was slowly being relegated to the informal settlements and tribal urban villages, while the overt face of the city was being cut through by new modern developments framed by national plans, modern roads, concrete buildings and modern regimes of power (Lattas and Rio 2011; UN-Habitat 2010). Across

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the mid- to late 1970s, traffic accidents accounted for over half of all traumatic fatalities in Port Moresby General Hospital. The most obvious visual signifier of the modern overlay came two decades later with the 1995 Poreporena Freeway project. Amid allegations of abuse about government contracts, it bisected the city, cutting through a mountain from Waigani to the downtown area, saving 20 minutes on the road trip between two centres of power, political and commercial. In modern geological terms, the freeway cut through an accretionary prism above a late Eocene–Oligocene NE-dipping subduction system. And it also cut through the customary land of the Motu Koitabu people. Today, nearly three decades after independence, the city is going through a new stage of frantic building, based on a natural-gas mining boom. Five-star hotels are being constructed, roads are being resurfaced, and local urban villages are being modernised.

Dili In 1975, the same year that Port Moresby became the capital of an independent Papua New Guinea, the Indonesian navy began a bombardment of Dili in East Timor. One colonial oppressor, the Portuguese, gave way to another in the name of ‘anti-colonialism’. New settlements were constructed around the old colonial town, small concrete houses, set close together amidst banana trees and bougainvillea, built for the transmigrants who had been brought to East Timor from Java and Sulawesi. Some suburbs were named as if they were Vietnam War hamlets: Delta 1, Delta 2, Delta 3 and Delta 4. The transmigrasi programme was intended to shift the ethnic composition of the city and make an Indonesian centre in a peripheral imperial outpost. Two decades on, and three years after independence and the departure of the Indonesians, those same suburbs became the site for a new stage of ethnic cleansing. This time a political culture of modern economic rights drew upon and distorted an older distinction between the Loromonu and Lorosae; those who came from where the sun sets and those who came from where the sun rises. The crisis was triggered in January 2006 by a petition of 600 soldiers (out of a total force of 1,600), led by Lieutenant Gastão Salsinha. The men claimed discrimination because of their roots in the Western part of the country. Indeed, a long-standing distinction continues between populations in Western Timor-Leste (Kaladi/Loromonu) and those hailing from the Eastern part of the country (Firaku/Lorosae), although it is neither ethnic nor linguistic, and neither clearly defined nor clearly delineated in geographic terms. It was mainly forged during the colonial period between people from the West, close to Dili, who were considered more ‘assimilated’, and those hailing from the East, who were deemed more ‘rustic’. It was reinforced during the Indonesian occupation from 1975 to 1999, when most of the armed resistance (linked to FRETILIN) was based in the East. The phenomenon was central to the petitioners’ claims. (Durand 2011, p. 16)

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Now, three decades on, with an oil-based boom, the city is reorienting in a different way. The emphasis is on infrastructure development. In the planning documents, such as the Timor-Leste Strategic Development Plan 2011–2031, older tensions have been left behind as if they were never present, and questions of cultural difference have been turned into concerns to protect and display cultural artefacts as museum heritage.

Johannesburg In 1975 Johannesburg was under Apartheid. Ponte City, a cylindrical skyscraper of 54 storeys, had just been built in the whites-only area of Hillbrow, making it the highest residential tower in Africa. In the same year the Western Bypass section of the N1 was completed as a route around the city centre to access Witwatersrand. Construction began in 1975 on the M1 De Villiers Graaff freeway connecting the south, including Soweto, to the city centre, and extending to Sandton, the wealthy northern commercial centre of Johannesburg. All of these developments confirmed the post-Apartheid spatial heritage of a poor South of concrete shacks and no work, and a wealthy North of commercial buildings, green leafy suburbs and service jobs; available to those in the South who could bear the two-hour peak travelling times. This spatial configuration is still the case. Between Soweto and the downtown area of Johannesburg, linked by a freeway that has just been massively upgraded, is a nether zone of continuing mining operations, slag heaps and undermined wastelands where building will require considerable engineering care. A new BRT system called Rea Vaya has been constructed linking the South and the North, with a significant shift in 2013 towards calling the project ‘Corridors of Freedom’. However, the images that are being used to promote this shift are of ultra-slim African women with young children, strolling along a modern street flanked by banks and health clinics. They are the gentle images of gentrification with the emphasis on ‘increased freedom of movement as well as economic freedom’. In a city with the highest Gini co-efficient in the world, it makes sense to concentrate on overcoming economic inequality, but so much more could be done.

Reconfiguring a Global South city: Port Moresby Cities in the Global South offer profound opportunities for ontological design, if only because they face a series of crises that open the door, just a fraction, to alternative ways of thinking and doing. Port Moresby is a baneful city with bountiful possibilities. From one perspective, Port Moresby exists as a grey shadow in the global imagination, as a city under internal siege. It is a city with one of the world’s worst street-crime rates, regularly appearing in The Economist’s annual list of the world’s ‘worst cities’. Occasionally a Western photographer will venture into Port Moresby to ‘humanize the raskols, to give them a face’ (Dupont cited in Kath and James 2010, p. 28). However, with the exception of mining executives

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and property developers, the movement of the world’s business people, tourists and media tends to bypass the city. Violence and insecurity seem to be inextricably associated with the growth of the city, and sadly this is intensifying as Port Moresby is flooded with property investment linked to the anticipated windfall from the new natural gas refinery. This violence is the focus of serious collective concern from local community-based and international organisations, just as it is headlined by sensationalising coverage in local newspapers. The demands of rapid uncontrolled migration, and the lack of affordable housing and other infrastructure, has seen the growth and overcrowding of the city’s informal settlements (Connell 2003). According to the 2000 census, 53,000 of Port Moresby’s residents lived in the settlements, a number which is likely to have drastically increased since then (Chand and Yala 2008). UN-Habitat estimates that 45 per cent of the city’s residents live in settlements. Of the city’s settlements, 20 are planned and 79 are unplanned, 42 are located on state land, and 37 are on customary land. The settlements often lack even the most basic amenities and infrastructure such as sanitation, water and electricity. Inadequate government responsiveness to these problems is in part due to the absence of any ministry devoted to dealing with settlement issues, an arrangement dating back to a policy change in 1986 that deregulated housing development (UN-Habitat 2010). From a more positive perspective, Port Moresby is a city of small urban communities. It is a city of villages, a meeting place of cultures, a tropical capital located on the Eastern coast of the beautiful Port Moresby Harbour. Overall, the complexity of Port Moresby is attributable to myriad factors including the Australian colonial legacy, vast wealth inequalities, intense movements of people, high rates of formal unemployment and a variably sustaining informal sector, ongoing destabilisation of cultural values and ways of life, and rising tensions between ethnic groups. Port Moresby was established on the traditional lands of two inter-related people now known collectively as the Motu-Koita. The growth of housing settlements, infrastructure and industry in the city has led the Motu-Koita to feel acute social marginalisation and deep anxiety about losing their cultural identity and land. This provides a point of entry for ontological design. The indigenous villages and the urban settlements of Port Moresby could become the focus of a revitalisation of the city. This will require a cultural and political reinvigoration of social engagement in those settlements, and it will be much more than just an infrastructure exercise. Nevertheless, some planning steps can be laid out, all of which presume considerable community discussion using deliberative democracy processes. If we begin with basic questions of the relationship between the natural and the social, then paradoxically modern planning with all its legislated restrictions and exclusions is necessary to bring settlement patterns back into more integral relationship with nature. This would require restraints, once in place, that have not been carried forward from indigenous customary cultures in the region concerning, for example, where houses can be built. Regulations to stop any further building on the hills above the city or into the littoral zone along the coastline

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would be part of this process. The Poreporena–Napa Local Development Plan, 2011, mentions the possibility of not building above the 90-metre contour as ‘an identifying element for the city’, but an ontological design proposal would require something much more radical than an aesthetic design element and it would be less tokenistic. Except in the immediate downtown area, the sloping hills above around 50 metres would need to be returned to a mixture of urban vegetable gardening and open eucalypt woodland forests, with green fingers stretching down into the valleys in ways that allow walking and limited vehicle access. In the valleys some land should ideally be zoned for food growing, integrated with urban housing estates. Land-use would need to be negotiated with the Motu-Koita, the original custodians of the land, and it would require considerable care about how plots of agricultural land were allocated and woodlands were set aside. Filling in the Fairfax Harbour with land-fill projects for yacht clubs and refineries is not ontologically sensitive design. The limits of natural boundaries, including coastlines, are important. Indigenous urban villages on the coast, such as Hanubada, presently built stretching out over the harbour, would need to be spatially limited so that they do not consume any more waterfront space, but more importantly industrial waterfront developments would need to be restricted to allow substantial green ribbons along the foreshore, crossed with public walking paths. Re-establishing mangrove ecosystems along the coastline needs to be a priority, both for practical reasons of responding to possible storm surges with climate change and for re-establishing a deep sense of nature as more than a ‘standing reserve’ for human exploitation. Achieving even the beginnings of this will require amongst other initiatives, extensive community engagement and support in nurturing the new plantations, policing of the use of mangroves and trees for firewood, and the installation of appropriately scaled and distributed sewerage and waste-water systems to stop the massive outflow that currently goes into the bay. Turning to the genealogical valence, the importance of cultural identity of family, language, tribe and region come to the fore, and what needs to be done is far from easy. The city of villages is associated with tension and violence. Paul Jones sets out the quandary very well: The escalating growth of settlements in Port Moresby has been recognised for some time as ‘cosmopolitan networks of tribal groupings or anarchical sub-cultures, which have been defined by ethnicity and regionalism within an urban context’. In certain informal settlements in Port Moresby, kinship and wantok systems play a crucial support role for people and households experiencing hardship and poverty. This system is more pronounced where settlements grow along ethnic connections and allegiances, such as in the case of Four Mile Settlement, where settlements represent enclaves, or a series of enclaves of kinship supporting squatter settlers primarily from the Southern Highlands region. However, it has been argued that applying the communal sharing cultures common to Pacific islanders in ‘ghetto’-type situations, for

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example, can constrain the use of existing economic development opportunities by settlers to improve their lifestyles. ‘In the ghettos, the home cultural values predominate and Pacific peoples behave as they do in their home villages’. In the PNG [Papua New Guinea] context, norms and values including notions of egalitarianism and sharing, can be argued as entrenching key aspects of PNG urban form, such as squatter and informal settlements, thus reinforcing Port Moresby image as predominantly a ‘city of villages’. (Jones 2012, pp. 11–12) While it has not always been the case, it has become increasingly recognised that Port Moresby is tied by lines of deep genealogical connection back to the rural villages as far away as the Kerema, Mount Hagen or Alatou districts. However, what is to be done about this remains completely perplexing for mainstream planning. The importance of such relations could be brought into the centre of Port Moresby public life by instituting a calendar of events that recognise urban–village ties. Exchange and trading relations between such places could be brought to the fore, including through negotiating spaces in designated open-air, sheltered food markets. There are some important examples currently such as Koki Market, but the construction of modern malls and supermarkets is increasing (with all the increased prices for basic goods that this entails). Across the city, land needs to be set aside near major transport nodes for farmers’ markets that are built into the urban fabric, designed with open stalls, but sheltered under two- to four-storey buildings, offering increased residential density. The mix of street-accessibility, open-air ground-floor spaces and increased residential density in otherwise commercial or dead zones, would enhance both the vitality and street security of the city. Handled badly this has potentially dangerous consequences for ethnic conflict. Thus the negotiation of the use of space would need to be linked, at the highest level, to the symbolic politics of negotiation between different customary groups currently at odds with each other. While urban villages will tend to remain more culturally homogenous, contestation over these public spaces could be a source of positive diversity. This brings us the question of the mythological valence, the relation between social practice and oral expressions of what that practice means, expressed through stories, art, images, building design, festivals, public rituals and street symbolism. Redesigning Port Moresby ontologically cannot be so much about retrieving lost cultural heritage as about negotiating ongoing times and spaces for continuing customary ways of life. Much of the Motu-Koita’s pre-colonial culture was fragmented during the colonial years. Missionaries viewed tribal dancing as immodest and banned it, replacing it with Polynesian-derived dances and later European dances. Some feasts connected with customary dances have also disappeared (Crowdy 2010; Goddard 2010b). In bringing back festivals it becomes important not to treat them as simply moments in time, but as peak expressions of ongoing practices that require ongoing support. However, if supported properly, and not just a tourist attraction, then the cultural effects are manifold. As

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Peter Phipps (2010, pp. 217–218) argues, ‘cultural festivals provide a potent space for intercultural accommodations to be negotiated on largely indigenous terrain, strengthening indigenous agency, and resetting the terms of cross-cultural engagement for at least the terms of these staged encounters’.

Conclusion Engaged theory of the kind that I have been drawing upon suggests a parting of the ways with current dominant methodological trends in urban social theory and practice, including some aspects of the newest trends. In a special edition of the European Journal of Cultural Studies devoted to the theme of urban modernity, Pedram Dibazar, Christoph Lindner, Miriam Meissner and Judith Naeff write that one new direction in conceptualising and theorising cities might be the appreciation of a flat ontology reminiscent of other recent approaches to cities, such as actor–network theory, non-representational theory, rhythm analysis and mobilities. What all these approaches engage with is the vast array of living conditions that are involved in what we call cities. Robinson writes: ‘Ordinary cities invite us to an appreciation of all cities as sites of the production and circulation of modernity.’ Thus, modernity entails a vision that is disseminated globally and diverse in its implications. The notion of ordinary cities advocates an urbanism of the here and now, that incorporates within its present the times gone and the times to come, and tends to reflect the conditions of globalisation by investigating the particularities of each locality. (Dibazar et al. 2013, p. 12) This proposed flattening is precisely what I am arguing against, theoretically and practically. Modernity might pluralise, but it tends to flatten social difference into liberal pluralism. The notion of ‘ordinary cities’ sounds good, but cities are not ordinary. Urban settlements have a range of ordinary, banal, symbolically intense and sacred spaces within them. They are formed through culturally diverse, syncretic and inclusive cultural meanings and practices, momentarily fixed at the intersection of cross-cutting movements. But they also develop spaces of differentiated meanings and practices; places filled with ontologically grounded meaning that require some degree of closure, slowness and exclusion. They are cut through by ideologically contested corridors, but they also include places of relatively closed mythological and cosmological meaning. Reconfiguring cities while taking into account these complexities is a massive and slow process. It will take years and generations, just as unplanned urban accretion works over generations. It will mean (paradoxically) planning for discomfort, encounter, tension and serendipity. Ontological design, in this argument, should always be part of the urban planning process. Getting rid of triple-bottom-line rationalism and using a four-domain model of the social that treats economics, ecology, politics and culture as fundamental domains of the human condition with

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their own principles, it is possible to show how ontological design can be built into the mainstream of what it means to make a city. This can be done while still keeping the process recognisably practical. The following list of propositions is informed by ontological design precepts, but it is presented with a very practical edge applicable to all urban settlements across the globe. These propositions are my preferences, but they are only indicative. To propose them as universal guidelines would go against the spirit of what ontological design is arguing for – that is, social engagement and debate at a city level across the various domains of social life that leads to each city developing and enacting its own priorities and actions. Nevertheless, they provide points of contention.

A manifesto for urban development Ecological propositions Urban settlements should have a deeper and more integrated relationship with nature: 1

2 3

4

5

6 7

With urban settlements organised around locally distributed renewable energy, planned on a precinct-wide basis, and with all existing buildings retrofitted for resource-use efficiency. With waterways returned to their pre-settlement condition, flanked, where possible, by indigenous natural green-spaces re-established along their edges. With green parklands – including areas which provide habitat for indigenous animals and birds – increased or consolidated within the urban area, connected by further linear green ribbons. With urban settlements organised into regional clusters around natural limits and fixed urban-growth boundaries to contain sprawl and renew an urban– rural divide; and with growth zones of increased urban density within those urban settlements focused on public transport nodes. With paths for walking, lanes for non-motorised vehicles, and corridors for sustainable public transport, given spatial priority over roads for cars; and with those dedicated paths networked throughout the city. With food production invigorated in the urban precinct through dedicated spaces being set aside for commercial and community food gardens. With waste management directed fundamentally towards green composting, hard-waste recycling and hard-waste mining.

Economic propositions Urban settlements should be based on an economy organised around social needs rather than growth: 1

With production and exchange shifted from an emphasis on productionfor-global-consumption to an economics-for-local-living, including ontologically different forms of exchange.

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2 3

4

5

6 7

With urban financial governance moved towards participatory budgeting on a significant proportion of the city’s annual infrastructure and services spending. With regulation negotiated publicly through extensive consultation and deliberative programmes, including an emphasis on regulation for resource-use reduction. With consumption substantially reduced and shifted away from those goods that are not produced regionally or for the reproduction of basic living, food, housing, clothing, music and so on. With workplaces brought back into closer spatial relation to residential areas, while taking into account dangers and noise hazards through sustainable and appropriate building. With technology used primarily as a tool for good living, rather than a means of transcending the limits of nature and embodiment. With the institution of re-distributive processes that break radically with current cycles of inter-class and inter-generational inequality.

Political propositions Urban settlements should have an enhanced emphasis on engaged and negotiated civic involvement: 1

2

3 4 5 6 7

With governance conducted through a deep deliberative democratic process that brings together comprehensive community engagement, expert knowledge and extended public debate about all aspects of development. With legislation enacted for socially just land-tenure, including, where necessary, thorough municipal and state acquisition of ecologically, economically and culturally sensitive areas. With public non-profit communication services and media outlets materially supported and subsidised where necessary. With political participation and representation going deeper than electoral engagement. With basic security afforded to all people through a shift to human security considerations. With reconciliation with indigenous people becoming an active and ongoing focus of all urban politics. With ethical debates concerning how we are to live becoming a mainstream requirement at all levels of education and in all disciplines from the humanities to medicine and engineering.

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Cultural propositions Urban settlements should come to terms with the uncomfortable intersections of identity and difference: 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

With recognition and celebration of the complex layers of community-based identity that have made the urban region, including cross-cutting customary, traditional, modern and postmodern identities. With the development of consolidated cultural activity zones, emphasising active street-frontage and public spaces for face-to-face engagement, festivals and events – for example, all-new commercial and residential apartment buildings should have an active ground floor, with part of that space zoned for rent-subsidised cultural use such as studios, theatres and workshops. With museums, cultural centres and other public spaces dedicated to the urban region’s own cross-cutting cultural histories, public spaces, which at the same time actively seek to represent visually alternative trajectories of urban development from the present into the future. With locally relevant fundamental beliefs from across the globe, except those that vilify and degrade, woven into the fabric of the built environment: symbolically, artistically and practically. With conditions for gender equality pursued in all aspects of social life, while negotiating relations of cultural inclusion and exclusion that allow for gendered differences. With the possibilities for facilitated enquiry and learning available to all from birth to old age across people’s lives; and not just through formal education structures, but also through well-supported libraries and community learning centres. With public spaces and buildings aesthetically designed and curated to enhance the emotional well-being of people, including by involving local people in that curation.

Within those propositions are cadences implied by ontological design. Borderland cities provide crucibles where arguably much more radical rethinking of urban development can occur than in the core cities of global circulation. These cities are located on the borderlands between the global and the local, between the urban and the rural, and between capitalism and other forms of economy and culture. They might even be a source of a new reciprocity in the currently one-way global movement of design ideas. Cities in the Global South such as Port Moresby could become places through which ideas, informed by non-modern practices, come to qualify fundamentally, our emphasis on making the built-environment in the image of current dominant ideologies: freedom, autonomy, interconnectivity and movement.

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References Chand, S. and Yala, C. 2008, ‘Informal land systems within urban settlements in Honiara and Port Moresby’, Making Land Work (Volume Two): Case Studies on Customary Land and Development in the Pacific, AusAID, Canberra. Connell, J. 2003, ‘Regulation of space in the contemporary postcolonial Pacific City’, Asia Pacific Viewpoint, vol. 44, no. 3, pp. 243–57. Crowdy, D. 2010, ‘Live music and living as a musician in Moresby’, in M. Goddard (ed.) Villagers and the City, SK Publishing, Wantage. Dibazar, P., Lindner, C., Meissner, M. and Naeff, J. 2013, ‘Questioning urban modernity’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 1367549413497695, first published on 8 August 2013. Durand, F. 2011, ‘Three centuries of violence and struggle in East Timor (1726–2008)’, Online Encyclopaedia of Mass Violence, first published on 14 October 2011, pp. 1–20, www.massviolence.org/Three-centuries-of-violence-and-struggle-in-East-Timor-1726 (accessed 18 August 2013). Fry, T. 2012, Becoming Human by Design, Berg, London. Gleeson, B. 2012, ‘The urban age: paradox and prospect’, Urban Studies, vol. 49, no. 5, pp. 931–43. Goddard, M. 2010a, ‘About Moresby’, in M. Goddard (ed.) Villagers and the City: Melanesian Experiences of Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, SK Publishing, Wantage. Goddard, M. 2010b, ‘Heat and history: Moresby and the Motu-Koita’, in M. Goddard (ed.) Villagers and the City, SK Publishing, Wantage. Hall, P. 1998, Cities in Civilization, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London. Jacobs, J. M. 1961, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Random House, New York. James, P. 2006, Globalism, Nationalism, Tribalism: Bringing Theory Back In, Sage Publications, London. James, P. 2010, ‘Displacement: In cities of the unrecognized’, in C. Wise and P. James (eds) Being Arab: Arabism and the Politics of Recognition, Arena Publications, Melbourne. Jones, P. 2012, Managing Urbanization in Papua New Guinea: Planning for Planning’s Sake?, Alfred Deakin Research Institute, Geelong. Kath, E. and James, P. 2010, ‘Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea’, in Global Cities Annual Review 2010, Global Cities Institute, RMIT University, Melbourne. Lattas, A. and Rio, K. M. 2011, ‘Securing modernity: Towards an ethnography of power in contemporary Melanesia’, Oceania, vol. 81, no. 1, pp. 1–21. Mignolo, W. D. 2000, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. Phipps, P. 2010, ‘Performances of power: Indigenous cultural festivals as globally engaged cultural strategy’, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, vol. 35, no. 3, pp. 217–40. Sennett, R. 1994, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization, Faber & Faber, London. Stead, V. 2013, Land, Power, Change: Entanglements of Custom and Modernity in Papua New Guinea and Timor-Leste, PhD dissertation, RMIT University, Melbourne. UN-Habitat 2010, Papua New Guinea: Port Moresby Urban Profile, UN-Habitat, Nairobi. Zukin, S. 2010, Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

6 AFRICA Designing as existence Helder Pereira and Coral Gillett

In order to have a discussion about ‘design’ and ‘Africa’, first we need to give perspective to the historical complexity of both concepts. Both the concept of ‘Africa’ and the concept of ‘design’ need to be unpacked: our notions of what these terms mean need to be de-stabilised, de-naturalised. In setting the scene, we necessarily cover a lot of ground. The messy complexity and interconnectedness of the range of topics covered (political, sociological, geographic, economic, epistemological and so on) is part of unconcealing the way that design operates within a global world order; we are attempting to situate design relationally, in order to understand what role ‘design’ can or should play in creating decolonial futures. One cannot speak of ‘Africa’, ‘African culture’ or even ‘Africans’ as a singular entity. To unite such an array of geographies, cultures, languages, religions and histories under one term is to perpetuate a singular, myopic vision of Africa: the familiar vision of famine or war, Masai warriors or safaris. To further complicate this, to talk of singular African nation-states also conceals the diversity of cultures and people within many African nations, and ignores the arbitrariness of national borders that were drawn up in a room in Berlin in 18851 without the input of or consideration for the interests of those who inhabited the continent, and what these new borders would mean for them. The contemporary and largely dysfunctional political reality of the continent is a legacy of the division of resources (natural, agricultural and human labour) of the continent among colonial powers. ‘Africa’ has arrived by design. In the face of this, there often emerges a desire to ‘go back’2 to something essential that existed ‘before’ (before colonisation, before European languages, before modernity and globalisation, before Christianity or Islam), yet this also misses the point. To ‘go back’ denies our past; contemporary African culture(s) have absorbed, rejected, reacted to and mutated out of a number of different cultural forces, both those during and after colonial expansion, along with the various migrations, trade

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and movement that occurred in the pre-colonial period. What we encounter today are cultures founded on fusions and mixings: some ideas and practices are absorbed and others are left behind. Even if we were to attempt to ‘go back’, the reality of broken traditions and the current globalised Western hegemony (and all of its projected desires) would render the project impossible. Instead, we need to examine what we are now, in order to ‘think otherwise’ (Delgado and Romero 2000, p. 11) and create new possibilities for the future ahead. The colonial project is currently being contested and deconstructed; the notion that colonisation was about bringing ‘light’, modernisation and development to the rest of the world has been exposed as a farce. Instead we now understand colonialism as primarily a vessel of economic expansion. Colonialism wasn’t a singular or coherent project; rather it was a result of various European powers competing for the world’s resources, each with their own colonial ‘method’. Modernity and coloniality are inextricably entangled (Mignolo 2011). We will discuss opportunities for decolonial design strategies in the context of Angola: as such, a brief overview of the nation’s history is required. Like most African countries, what is now known as Angola historically consisted of various nations with distinct histories, traditions and languages. Portuguese traders first came in contact with this part of the African coast in 1483, and maintained various enclaves along the coast in their development and expansion of the Atlantic slave trade, though ‘modern colonization of the whole territory was only formalized four centuries later after the Berlin Conference’ (Meijer and Birmingham 2004, p. 11). While initially based on slave trading, other economies later emerged (agricultural production of cash crops and the exploitation of natural resources such as timber, diamonds and later oil), fuelling the expansion of Portuguese colonialism. While Portugal ‘banned’ slavery in 1836, forced labour continued in Portuguese African territories under similar conditions for approximately 100 years (Weeks 2013). The history of Angola (given that the notion of ‘Angola’ came out of the colonial project) is a history of the defuturing of the place and the people: the demands placed on [Angola’s] wealth have been associated with repression and suffering. Portuguese slavers plundered Angola of its people and shipped them to Brazil’s plantations. Colonialists expropriated Angola’s best land to provide an agricultural surplus for Portugal and an outlet for its impoverished population. The industrial economy of the twentieth century and the spread of luxury consumption provided a demand for Angola’s oil and diamonds that partly fuelled four decades of war. Angola’s wealth appears to be a curse for its people. (le Billon 2001, pp. 55–56) In the post-Second World War era, while other colonial powers were gradually moving towards policies of autonomous rule and decolonisation, Portugal sought to retain its colonial possessions by ‘rebranding’ them as ‘Portuguese overseas territories’. The theory of ‘Lusotropicalism’ developed by Brazilian Gilberto Freyre

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in 1933 proposed that the Portuguese ‘race’ was different from other European colonisers, having a unique ‘ability to establish and maintain egalitarian and non-discriminatory relationships with tropical peoples’ (Bender 1978, p. 287) as ‘evidenced’ by miscegenation, though it is argued that this misrepresented a history of sexual violence structurally entrenched in Portuguese colonies (Lança 2011). The Lusotropical myth, though deeply unpopular in Portugal when first published, was mobilised by the Portuguese ‘Estado Novo’ regime in 1951 to justify to the newly formed United Nations that these territories were not in fact ‘colonies’, but extensions of the Portuguese nation itself (Neto 1997, p. 341), and that the people of these territories were able to become Portuguese citizens through ‘progressive assimilation’ (Borges Coelho 2003, pp. 177–178). The final stage of Portuguese colonialism in Africa (1951–1974) was characterised by a twofold approach: a nation-building exercise that aimed to modernise the colonies and support the Lusotropical narrative, and an extreme militarisation of society and suppression of independence or nationalist sentiments. Lusotropical doctrines were widely accepted as being valid by twentiethcentury diplomats and political thinkers in both Europe and the United States, many of whom believed that Portuguese colonialism in Africa would continue indefinitely. (Bender 1978) A major part of the Lusotropical nation-building project involved the mobilisation of aesthetic expression to communicate to the Portuguese people, the colonised subject and the international community the new values and intentions of an empire adapting to embrace the progressive rhetoric of the New World Order (even if the reality wasn’t in line with this vision). As has been noted elsewhere, ‘in order to make itself present, empire must represent, and architecture is a key device of such representation’ (Dutta 2008, p. 292). Modernist architectural style was deemed appropriate for this nation-building exercise: not only was it an aesthetic that communicated ‘progressive’ values (in the eyes of the European community), but its technologically advanced methods of rapid, standardised mass production were ideal in the face of the large-scale construction of cities required throughout the empire to receive the wave of migration from Portugal to the colonies. This centralisation allowed control to be retained within the metropole, facilitating ‘action at distance’ (Chang 2010).3 Contradictorily, at the same time as this was occurring, modernist architectural style was suppressed in the metropole under a nationalist dictatorship that sought to minimise external influences and instead celebrate the rediscovery of an ‘original’ Portuguese vernacular aesthetic (Fernandes 2011). It was in this context that the colonies constituted a territory available for experimental construction. They were regions less influenced by the presence of traditional construction methods because, for this generation, ‘indigenous’ methods weren’t considered viable options (Milheiro 2012).

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Ironically, while ‘traditional’ or ‘vernacular’ practices in Portugal were being celebrated, the vernacular traditions of the various colonial spaces were not simply unrecognised, but actively being erased. The legacy of this erasure continues: peoples, places, and local knowledges are effectively bypassed by globalized processes of architectural production. Even in poorer urban areas and remote rural regions, people choose to build modern style buildings instead of adopting more sustainable local forms and materials. As a result, indigenous building knowledges and technologies have been disappearing rapidly in many places. (Lu 2010b, p. 20) Aside from the use of modernist architecture to create large public monuments and institutional buildings that clearly communicated and maintained the order of colonial power, it was also used as a civilising vehicle in inducting the native population into the European way of life, which was often rewarded through assimilado legal status. Angolan society at the time was constituted by colonos (colonials or Europeans), mestiços (creole or mixed race), assimilados (assimilated) and indígenas (indigenous). The assimilado were granted numerous privileges and advantages that the indígena weren’t, however, in Angola, they never reached more than two per cent of the native population (Pereira 2000). From the 1950s to the early 1970s, housing for the native population was a central concern for colonial architects. Using the rhetoric of ‘hygiene’, traditional vernacular building methods were discouraged (though sometimes stylistically referenced), to be replaced by the provision of housing by the colonial authority. Residents for such housing projects were selected from the indígena population based on their conformity to certain ‘moral and social behaviours’. ‘One of the requirements was the knowledge of the Portuguese language, and it was demanded that the houses not be modified by the inhabitants’ (Milheiro 2012, p. 346). At the same time, the speaking of Kimbundu (one of the local languages) was outlawed (Afropop Worldwide 2012), being seen as ‘subversive’ and opening the potential for nationalist sentiment and terrorist threat. Architects articulated the design intent of the housing project as the creation of: the stimulus and incentive for the natives to understand the problems of hygiene and culture. … The publicly promoted house assumed a role as a civilising method … serving as a vehicle for the initiation of African populations into the occidental way of living. (Milheiro 2012, p. 354) Rather than being a neutral aesthetic practice, design in this context was a vehicle of the making of social norms (and unmaking of existing ways of being). As has been argued by Walter Mignolo, ‘modernity’ (a project that commenced with the European Enlightenment) cannot be separated from coloniality: the ‘modern’ could never have come into being without the colonial project that began

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with the European creation of the Atlantic trade circuit in the sixteenth century and was always a fundamentally economic project (Mignolo 2011, p. 7). This duality of the colonial/modern characterised the following 500 years. The common representation of the colonial exercise as one culture’s outward projection of the modern (from the metropole to the periphery) with nothing ‘returning’ from the periphery to inform and influence the development of the ‘modern’ in the metropole is fundamentally false. Instead, it was a series of transactions (many of which were exploitative), which involved the absorption and transmutation of materials, practices and knowledges from elsewhere (Alvares 1980, p. 275). In other words, Europe is what it is today because of the colonial project. ‘Modernist’ architecture and design is an illustration of this: without the technological advancements linked to the industrialisation of Europe which occurred due to the wealth of the colonial economies; without massive extraction of mineral resources from colonies needed to create new building materials and techniques; and without colonies as sites of experimentation, ‘modernist architecture’ would not have occurred. The history of the rise of modern architecture can be seen not as the spread of the European sun that shone its lights throughout the world, but as a global process that lumbered into being as a polycentric network, rather than a unifocal spread. (Prakash 2010, pp. 263–264) The Industrial Revolution is commonly pointed to as the moment that design as a practice emerged, evolving out of the division of labour and technological change. As is now being made explicit, the history of design is entangled with the history of colonialism, even if this appears to be deliberately avoided in most design history discourses. It was not just design in the colonial spaces that perpetuated or supported colonialism; design in the ‘metropoles’ made use of a seemingly unlimited supply of raw materials, contributed to the rise of consumerism and created demand for products that perpetuated the colonial system of exploitation of labour, extraction of raw materials and environmental destruction. Thus, we see design today acting within a similar paradigm, albeit in a ‘postcolonial’ world. Design has always been an actor in an economic/political system and, as such, has never been ‘neutral’. At the same time, this very fact is concealed, and ‘design’ is presented as a ‘universal’ discourse and practice concerned merely with pursuits of form and aesthetic, occupying a site of political neutrality. ‘This formalist frame is patently inadequate to understanding the informal skeins of power … while our attention is brought instead to the usual formal litany of brises-soleil, wing-shaped roofs, courtyards, concrete screens, and what-have-you’ (Dutta 2008, p. 293). In examining French modernist designer Jean Prouvé’s prototypical prefabricated Maison Tropicale houses destined for French African colonies, Daniel Huppatz notes that, while ‘modernity and globalization are intimately entangled with colonialism’ (Pinney cited in Huppatz 2010, p. 33),

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design history has thus far failed to engage with this relationship. … design history currently lacks a suitable framework … that could incorporate the complexity of its design and manufacture, as well as its shifting meaning on its trajectory from France to colonial Africa. (Huppatz 2010, p. 33) Indeed, the Maison Tropicale is an example of a designed artefact that embodies modernist architecture’s most progressive intentions of ‘universalism’ – employing new technologies to standardise the design and manufacture of objects as an egalitarian means to improve quality of life for its intended users. However, in a colonial context, the modernist emphasis on new technologies and industrial processes could serve another purpose; rather than standardising and thus improving social conditions, it could maintain cultural difference and reinforce colonial power relations. While Ateliers Prouvé exemplified (modernist architecture’s) social and political morality at the level of both design and production processes, when applied to the French colonial project, such modernist ideology would prove problematic (Huppatz 2010). ‘Seen in this context, the designer’s role is hardly that of autonomous creative agent; instead, the role is rather more limited and intimately enmeshed in the network of relationships that come together with colonial modernization’ (Huppatz 2010, pp. 40–41). We need to understand that design as it currently exists is rooted in and pre-determined by the colonial/modern project, which is today extended by globalisation and the rhetoric of ‘development’. To put it succinctly: No chapter in Western modernity is complete unless it includes the history of the epistemological violence that European colonial power did to other peoples. During the course of constructing the contemporaneity of other cultures as the primordial prehistory of the dominant self, the West dwarfed other knowledges as irrational narratives that should be exorcised for lack of epistemological validity. With this calculated refusal, the way was paved for the spread of the sovereignty of Western knowledge throughout the world, which has enduring consequences long after the end of colonialism. (Lu 2010a, pp. 145–146) As seen earlier in the example of housing in Portuguese African colonies, design, through its contribution to the erasure of cultures, perpetuated (and continues to perpetuate) this epistemological violence. Vernacular design (for example, building traditions) that had been inherently place-based both climatically and culturally were actively erased to be replaced by the ‘modern’, giving rise to inherently unsustainable practices. The erasure of vernacular design traditions today is accelerating – traditional building methods are actively being abandoned by individuals, communities and institutions in favour of low-quality, poorly designed and built structures of concrete, steel and glass, which represent an association with the ‘modern’ and ‘developed’ (and by extension, ‘logic’ and ‘reason’,

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as well as ‘wealth’ and ‘success’). This is both a result and a perpetuation of ‘epistemological violence’. This epistemological violence opened up the potential for (and made banal) all other types of violence that travelled with colonialism: physical, structural, sexual and cultural. This violence continues under the rhetoric of ‘development’. Development was the name given to the strategy of modernization. This project was commonly presented as a benign process. While it was believed that it entailed a certain level of dislocation and destruction of traditions, in the long run development was seen as inevitable and beneficial. Over the first development decades, few took notice that the level of violence entailed by development was not secondary and temporary but actually long lasting and structural. … this violence is not only endemic but constitutive of development. (Escobar 2004, pp. 15–16) It has been argued that in the Angolan context, the ‘colonial order of violence created the post-colonial violent order’ (Borges Coelho 2003). Specifically, the extreme militarisation of all levels of society in the Angolan war of independence from 1961 to 1974 (which included, among other strategies, the creation of elite African military and intelligence forces that were mobilised against African nationalist and pro-independence elements) created a dynamic of violence that continued unbroken into the 27-year civil war that followed from 1975 to 2002. The epistemological and cultural violence characterised by the ‘Lusotropical’ nation-building approach (in which design played a part) was paired with a physical and structural violence that would characterise the conflict that continued in Angola for decades after Portuguese colonialism ended: Physical violence has devastated the country, killed or maimed hundreds of thousands, displaced millions, and violated generations of young people. Structural violence has resulted in a political situation in which the regime and [opposition rebels] UNITA indulged in an orgy of authoritarianism and repression, which has left much of the population in a state of aggravated trauma. (Chabal 2007, p. 321) Whether intentional or not, design was an agent of colonisation, and in the context of globalisation, acts as an agent of neo-colonialism today. As Santiago Castro-Gómez (2007, p. 435) notes, ‘coloniality does not disappear in postmodern capitalism, but is reorganised in a postcolonial way’. Considering this, how should design practice be engaged today in the African context? Given that a large part of that which goes under the banner of ‘design practice’ is predominantly preoccupied with material and aesthetic pursuits, to have a conversation about the role of ‘design’ in ‘Africa’, or even of ‘African design’ immediately

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evokes a certain aesthetic imagery. This usually relates to the representation of ‘traditional African culture’ in global media (Euro-American literature and film histories dominating), or is aligned with European art historical practices that have valorised ‘exotic’ craft objects that come to represent ‘traditional’ African material and aesthetic practices. In places such as Angola, in the face of widespread cultural erasure as a result of centuries of colonisation, religious conversions, modernisation, war and displacement, development and globalisation (and all the associated acculturation, assimilation, rejection of, reaction to, and hybridity out of this), there is not necessarily a direct lineage to pre-colonial aesthetic and material practices. The question becomes ‘what is traditional anyway?’ The irony is that a global televisual image of what is ‘traditional’ ‘African’ culture is reflected back to contemporary urban Angolans via international media, giving form to an ‘African’ identity and aesthetic that is rooted in a televisual image which arguably owes as much to The Lion King as it does to any ‘pure’ form of ‘traditional’ cultures and aesthetic practices. In furniture shops in Luanda you can select items from the ‘African’ suite (most likely made in China with timber from Indonesia) that sits between a ‘baroque’ themed and a ‘minimalist’ suite. This ‘televisual’ image of what constitutes ‘African-ness’ aligns with the design profession’s preoccupation with visual and aesthetic pursuits. Jeanne van Eeden exposes the way that televisual culture has come to define the image of ‘Africa’: these strategies are by no means innocuous, and are founded on ideological assumptions and mythic constructs that position … Africa as a definitive hallucinatory space of the colonial imagination. Indeed, it seems ironic that, while buzzwords such as postcolonialism and political correctness ostensibly inform interaction with culture and history, the colonial legacy continually asserts itself in popular culture and reinscribes a politics of power in the entertainment landscape. (Van Eeden 2004, p. 18) Perhaps ‘African design’ could be characterised by a contemporary ‘remixing’ of this visual symbolism, an aesthetic that takes African signifiers and abstracts or references them, positioning these signifiers in a ‘high design’ setting in a cosmopolitan market of consumer goods. (One of many examples of this is Italian furniture company Moroso’s exhibition at Milan Salone de Mobile 2009 entitled M’Afrique, C’est Chic.4) In a world ‘drowning in objects’ (Sudjic 2009, p. 7) Western/global consumers increasingly look for authenticity in the ‘things’ that surround them, as antithesis to the alienation felt in a bland, homogenised and over-designed material world. Objects that are perceived to have a more direct connection to traditional cultures, or visually reference material practices from other places or other times find value in this space. ‘African’ signifiers often appear in this setting. Moroso’s visually rich exhibition in Milan consisted of a textural layering of photographic images of urban African environments, African wax

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print fabrics and pieces from Moroso’s M’Afrique furniture range – made from woven plastic threads, inspired by Africa in one way or another, and designed by various international designers. The placement of this exhibition at the Salone del Mobile is telling; the furniture fair celebrates design’s ability to ceaselessly renew cyclical fashion trends in furniture and interior design, and its ability to promote exponential manufacture and consumption of chairs (when arguably there are already enough chairs in the world). This is design in its most consumerist incarnation, and positions ‘Africa’ as simply another ‘style’ for sale. ‘Africa’ as an idea and a signifier becomes commodified, employed simply to sell more ‘stuff’ in the global ‘cultural supermarket’ (Matthews 2000). By way of catering to the needs of the cosmopolitan consumer in search of identity, these experts deprive the objects of their African character while simultaneously marketing their African nature. What defines authenticity in this case lies in the observer’s gaze and not in the object itself … the African continent is relegated to the status of a periphery that acts as a regenerative principal for the centre. Cosmopolitan consumerism actively participates in this process. (Sylvanus 2007, p. 205) Cosmopolitanism acts in homogenising the world, furthering the erasure or silencing of genuinely non-Western cultures by reducing them to quaint material traditions. The irony of this ‘flattening’ of African culture into a series of visual motifs is that, through the hegemony of Eurocentric design education (even in non-Western contexts) combined with design media and publishing channels, many ‘formally’ trained African designers are likely to have this very same view of what might constitute an ‘African design’ practice. The ‘hubris of the zero point’ has become naturalised (Mignolo 2009, p. 8). This brings us to another notion of how design as a practice might operate in African contexts: the recent celebration of ‘humanitarian design’ or ‘social design’ practices. The cover of the Design for the Other 90% publication can stand as representative here: it features an African woman drinking purified water through the LifeStraw®. The problems with the way that this image arrives are threefold: the first is the fact that this is a design conceived of and implemented by Westerners – it is the African face that creates the association. As has been noted elsewhere (Downie 2012), the name of the publication reveals a certain set of assumptions: Design for the Other 90% (rather than Design by or with the Other 90%). The second problem relates to the framework of humanitarian design itself. Humanitarian design receives significant attention in international design media as it appeals to a broader dissatisfaction within the professional design community regarding the purpose, intent and agency of contemporary design practices, and appeals to an inherent altruism in many designers. This quantity of media attention in itself is problematic: reinforcing the view that in terms of design,

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Africa has little to offer, but much to receive. Again we face the problem of the televisual image of Africa – young designers who want to ‘help’ have an embedded image of who needs to be ‘helped’. Significant debate and criticism of social design or humanitarian design has been entered into (Change Observer 2010) and we do not seek to replicate these critiques here. Much of it echoes the criticisms directed at aid, development and missionary projects: Africans (or any other non-Western ‘undeveloped’ people) are to be helped by civilised/enlightened/ developed/skilled foreigners in order to bring them ‘into’ civilisation/‘the light’/ new markets/economic self-sufficiency/better quality of life. Indeed, humanitarian design has been equated with imperialism (Nussbaum 2010). What is missing from the debate is a fundamental rethinking of the structural conditions that create the ‘need’ for humanitarian design responses in the first place. Many humanitarian design approaches appear to be patching up holes in a system that cannot deliver what is needed to whom/what needs it in an equitable manner without ‘defuturing’ (Fry 1999) – whether that system be corrupt governance structures, a socially exploitative and environmentally devastating ‘global capitalism without rules’ (de Sousa Santos 2012) or a new globalised ‘coloniality of power’ (Castro-Gómez 2007) that perpetuates the global system that came into being through colonialism. Arturo Escobar (2004) asserts that, counter to the technocentric argument that lies at the foundation of ‘development’, the problems created in the modernisation of the world do not have ‘modern’ solutions: This is clearly the case, for instance, with massive displacement and ecological destruction, and also development’s inability to fulfil its promise of a minimum of well-being for the world’s people. At the base of this modern incapacity lies the fact that many of modern society’s key functions have been subordinated to technology and the market. (Escobar 2004, p. 16) The question of who is designing for whom is key here. A comment taken from an online discussion on social design asks: Aren’t there local designers? Why should university students from the US or the ‘developed world’ … develop ‘appropriate’ solutions when there might be local designers who have grown up in or in close proximity to these environments? And if these local designers aren’t there, isn’t that the real issue? (BonTempo 2010) This brings us to the third problem: there are in fact designers ‘there’, and we propose that it is the conception of what design is that needs to be expanded. Rather than advocating the creation of a generation of ‘African designers’ who exist within a global mainstream model of design practice (as it is rooted in the modern/colonial world order), we are advocating a dramatic re-thinking of design; we must ‘change the frame’ (Mignolo 2009, p. 6) of the design conversation

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to broaden a conception of (i) what design is, (ii) who the designers are, and (iii) what should be designed. Design and designing activity has been defined in many ways by many people. A common conception involves the prefiguring and undertaking of actions with the intent to respond to a condition in order to change it. It has been argued that it is our ability to ‘design’ (broadly understood) that makes us human (Fry 2012). Mainstream design practices are about designing a world (and designing within a world) with a commonly accepted set of rules. However, the majority of the world isn’t actually following any such convention. The everyday reality of many people globally is one that is shaped by a number of contradictory structural conditions that need to be navigated and reconciled with adaptability and flexibility. The ‘rules’ bend and flex, depending on who you are, your negotiation skills or how much you are willing (or able) to pay. The contradictory nature of such structural conditions is normalised, and their interconnectedness with an often exploitative global order is concealed. Design acts within and perpetuates this condition of concealment. As such, design has lost agency; we are proposing a reconsideration of what constitutes design as a means to reclaim agency. The everyday experience of the majority of people of Luanda is characterised by responsiveness, flexibility, in the face of complex systems that are constantly changing, structural inefficiencies, inequalities and injustices. Luanda is constantly transformative. We live in the present, and adapt to the circumstances with practices and habits that have become representative of a contemporary Angolan identity. The following case studies present various ‘designers’ who are engaged in designing, as a means of existence, and who demonstrate highly developed ‘design thinking’, though they would not be formally recognised as ‘designers’ in the context of mainstream design practice. The design activity that these designers engage in cannot be separated from the contexts in which they operate: economic, cultural, information communication practices and the material flows and exchanges.

The responsive economy – kinguilas Informal money changers (kinguilas) are predominantly women and are a common sight on almost every street in the city centre, markets, outside shops and other locations with pedestrian traffic. It is a practice, which appeared during the decades of war, economic instability and the associated inflation of the currency, in which a month’s salary devalued overnight by converting one’s earnings into USA dollars became a counter to this, and resulted in a dual-currency economy. The informal money changers were able to offer better exchange rates, change smaller notes and avoid the red tape associated with formal transactions in the few banks that existed at the time. The practice continues, though is likely to disappear with increased currency regulation in the country. Despite their ubiquity, these practices are officially illegal, but tolerated in practical terms. Such trades have an ability to adapt and seize opportunities of current economic conditions (reflected in the formal economy) through mobility and immeasurable inventiveness. Distinguishable from

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each other, street vendors and the kinguilas have by necessity a collaborative relationship. Their inhabitation and temporal designed ‘appropriation’ of under-utilised or neglected spaces, the leftovers of the modern city, reveals a re-conception of property tenure and ownership. Many situations exhibit an appropriation of areas that aren’t otherwise being used at a particular time of day/week, and in many cases their presence is desirable in a city characterised by crime and low-level fear, indicating a safer neighbourhood: keeping an eye on the comings and goings while passing on gossip, echoing Jane Jacob’s maxim of ‘eyes on the street’ (Jacobs 1962). Products and services are advertised through a system of codes: calls, shouts and other noises, hand signals and physical expressions, while another set of codes is deployed to communicate common threats within and between groups, whether petty crime or authorities (their illegal status makes them prey to exploitation by fiscal agents). The threat is communicated and the defensive mechanisms deployed: product displays are quickly dismantled, hidden or camouflaged, or in some cases the ladies themselves disappear, locking up their goods and surveying the situation from a strategic vantage point until the threat has passed. The deployment and manipulation of physical elements in the environment they have constructed, reveals an intentional designing not only of the spatial environment and objects, but of a system in which they are able to maintain a degree of control in the face of structural barriers to their existence. These ‘designers’ are redesigning not only the physicality of the spaces they occupy, but also the social implications of these spaces in the broader functioning of the city. These readings of the physical environment (with regard to threats and opportunities) allow us to contemplate new modes of visual communication. ‘Formal’ urban design or city planning practices and city authorities tend to either actively discourage such practices (whether through design or through authoritative force) or turn a blind eye. More interesting however would be a ‘formal’ design practice that recognises and not only allows for but designs in the possibility for these other ‘designers’ to appropriate and re-appropriate spaces within the city.

Production and distribution of cultural expression – kuduro and kandongueiros Kuduro is a style of music and dance that emerged from the musseques of Luanda in the early 1990s. It has evolved after the end of the war (2002), exploiting developments in affordable electronic music production technologies. Kuduro is infused with something of the contemporary condition of the vast majority of young Angolans living on the economic fringes in Luanda, a city full of new skyscrapers and air-conditioned four-wheel drives. The music’s lyrics and its dance style can be seen to act as a ‘processing’ or ‘metabolising’ of this existence: dealing with memories of war and displacement and the current barriers to opportunity at the same time as infusing the optimistic quasi-patriotic sensibility of ‘Angolanidade’. The dance often features:

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graphic theatrical movements such as crawling on the ground as if in a battle, dancing on the thighs as if the legs were amputated, dancing with legs turned inwards as if on crutches, dancing on crutches, with missing limbs or mimicking media images of ‘starved Africans’. (Siegert and Alisch 2012) Music is not immune to the difficult economic and social conditions but by presenting them in new and different terms, music allows people to engage these conditions critically and mockingly and to celebrate their own survival (Moorman cited in Siegert and Alisch 2012). Luanda’s blue and white mini-van taxis (kandongueiros) constitute an informal public transport system used by the majority of the population to move through the city on a daily basis. Many vans are customised: some are air-conditioned, some have a TV mounted to the ceiling or neon lights installed, while others have an impressive sound system. Kuduro’s widespread prevalence in Luanda is due in large part to its distribution through the kandongueiro networks. The main distribution channels for kuduro in Luanda are minibus taxis … Kuduro is performed on street corners when the [k]andongueiros turn into mobile sound systems … Kuduro had been circulating in informal distribution structures of [k]andongueiros, street vendors and on the internet with little access to mainstream media for nearly 20 years. (Siegert and Alisch 2012) New tunes are introduced into a frenzied network of car stereo CDs and USB drives, constantly deleted or copied (depending on the personal taste of driver and money collector, and the instant feedback given by an audience), and more recently sharing of files on mobile phones via bluetooth. Kuduro and kandongueiros are a cultural symbiosis; both are in direct contact with their audiences from the bottom up. The future success of a specific track is measured by its uncontrolled propagation throughout a huge network of taxis, challenging aspects of intellectual property and conventional music distribution methods.

The newspaper teller – information, citizenship and literacy In addition to the newspaper sellers that discover entrepreneurial opportunities in pockets between the swaying of cars in sporadic traffic jams every morning, a different kind of newspaper seller is also present, interacting with pedestrians. Their presence is noticed by the gathering crowds, elbowing a spot for a free scan through the major newspapers and magazines, displayed wide open. In this city, not everyone can afford (or read) a newspaper, and so this seller also becomes a ‘teller’ of the news. Headlining stories are recounted to the crowd, relaying the ‘facts’ presented in heavily censored publications infused with an unpretentious cynical humour (a necessary tool for survival in Luanda).

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The newspaper teller has the ability not only to tell, but to listen reflectively to the sentiments of his clientele, who are usually a marginalised audience spoken to by those with power. He relies on his artistry of the spoken word and performance, a manifestation of his creativity. In a political environment with a questionable record of freedom of the press, his performance is a vehicle not only of transmitting news, but also in influencing that which is communicated; shifting biases, exposing power and hypocrisy, showing the content as either relevant or absurd. The way the content is enunciated changes it; this shift alludes to Mignolo’s (2009, p. 5) thoughts on the enunciated and the enunciator. In an era of information overload and highly controlled and scripted dissemination of ‘truths’, mainstream communication design practices often become a matter of spinning these truths in a manner that suits the needs of whoever is footing the design bill. Discussion of the ethical implications of this has spawned interesting critical design practices globally, however these remain by far the minority. What can the newspaper teller’s ‘designing activity’ lend to this conversation? ‘The teller’ (see Homer/Odyssey) is an early European example of communicating place before the invention of writing and printing press; the invention of the printing press resulted in a modern society that relies heavily on words and images, as opposed to the oral and aural communication of place. What this means from a phenomenological point of view is that in order to have an integral experience of place we need to experience things, situations, places by using all of our senses. Through the processes of colonisation, modernisation and globalisation, this ‘modern’ form of communication has been superimposed on non-European societies, erasing or changing the forms of communication that existed, which were often inherently place-based. Indeed, oral tradition in various African societies has a long history that is now being recognised, albeit in the face of much erasure and lost histories. These traditions pre-date European equivalents such as Homer’s ‘teller’, and often incorporate multi-sensory and participatory forms of performance or interaction.

The finder/maker: re-sourcing resources Jorge da Silva Evangelista was a fisherman turned self-proclaimed homebuilder, a title that came out of the necessity for shelter and the dream of owning a home. His story is based on his ability to see resources in what other people see as waste. [My materials are] easy to find, I transform rubbish. In reality it’s not rubbish. For those who throw it away, it is rubbish. They throw it and I take advantage of it, in order to make my reality, to construct my project. (Evangelista 2013, pers. comm., 30 March)5 Not owning land, he has settled where he could, on the edge of an informal wasteland beside an urban shantytown. He started by appropriating the carcass of an automobile and lining it with that which was of no scarcity in the surrounding

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area: rubbish. In ten years of living in this location, he has built his own house with real walls and has a business venture selling recuperated materials and objects, while the car carcass lies nearby as a reminder of the past. He articulates the value of the knowledge and skill he has gained through his experience: ‘I recuperate that which needs it, according to my experience. If it wasn’t for the experience that I have, I wouldn’t have anything constructed here’ (Evangelista 2013, pers. comm., 30 March). Everything is reused, reassembled. Without necessarily being conscious of it, he has reassembled his knowledge, his way of seeing and understanding the world. Jorge da Silva Evangelista’s view of the world and his designing actions are reminiscent of Claude Lévi-Strauss’ (1966) bricoleur, who makes do with whatever is to hand. The bricoleur works within the world with what already exists, deconstructing the notion that we just keep building more or adding to whatever already exists. The materially ‘sustainable’ nature of such existences has been discussed elsewhere (Daniels 2010). What does Jorge da Silva Evangelista’s designing activity have to teach to a Western world of designed obsolescence and ‘disposable’ designed objects that embody criminal quantities of natural resources? On one level the above case studies fall into what is typically coined ‘the informal economy’. However, this characterisation oversimplifies the situation; in many contexts the ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ cannot be neatly separated, and it has been noted that ‘the distinction between formal and informal economies makes little sense in Africa, other than as code words for certain types of activities’ (Chabal 2009, p. 109). In a context where the ‘formal’ is an imposed globalised model that is only accessible by a minority, the ‘informal’ is its dialectic. The capitalist ‘formal’ economy has created the ‘informal’ economy, at the same time as cutting off access to the formal economy (and therefore trapping actors within the informal) (Daniels 2010, p. 17). The formal relies on the informal and vice versa: they exist in a complex relationship of interdependency. The informal sector explicitly recognises its reliance on the formal sector (among other things, for by-products, occasional knowledge transfer, and most importantly customers) whereas the formal sector conceals its reliance (in the form of cheap labour and services unavailable in the formal sector, but equally customers and revenue) under discussions of illegality, etc. As such, the ‘informal’ sector, existing as it does in a position of ‘plurality’ (Escobar 2011), offers a useful site of exploration of decolonial options. Most of the ‘designers’ in Luanda create a system (or object within a system), then modify and change it on a temporal basis as required. Out of necessity, objectthings are always seen in motion, as available for appropriation and reinvention. Conventional design practices generally create fixed responses to fixed problems, and the resulting design is fixed in time, without the ability to adapt, mutate and be redesigned over time as the ‘brief’ changes, the assumption being that a ‘new’ design is now called for. This is a symptom of ‘education in error’ (Fry 2009, p. 174). We (and particularly designers) are inducted into not-seeing every material thing in our life-world as being in motion, travelling from one state to another

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over time, travelling along the extraction–manufacture–use–landfill trajectory. Designers are particularly culpable in perpetuating this blindness to the ecological consequences of our material existence. In considering the ‘designers’ of Luanda, we challenge a number of assumptions: who is the authority on design, and how is this authority maintained; who ‘legitimises’ what is (and isn’t) considered design; who (or what) dictates the terms of the design discussion; why it is still Western/developed world actors ‘bringing’ a flawed model of design (both as discourse and practice) to the rest of the world; and why design (as an agent of globalisation) should be celebrated for actively inculcating people into a Western consumerist way of being (continuing the process of erasure embedded in colonialism/modernist architecture). Design has acted in the service of the culture and economy of modernity and its metropolitan and global extension. It has been deeply implicated in the universalization of modernity and unsustainability. (Fry 2009, p. 100) By characterising these actors as ‘designers’ we are attempting to decolonise design, to remake it in our own fashion, to serve our own needs, in order to open up the opportunities for design to act in the creation of decolonial futures. There is increasing recognition within both Western cultures and non-Western border territories that human existence is currently unsustainable, as the planet’s finite ability in supporting a certain type of human existence is being revealed. Many approaches are emerging in understanding and naming this phenomena (‘defuturing’; the anthropocene; changing climate and environmental catastrophe), all of which implicate directly or indirectly the role of ‘design’ broadly understood in creating the situation we now find ourselves in. We face centuries of climatic change ahead regardless of what we do now: an increase in extreme climate events (a.k.a. ‘natural’ disasters); resource stress; decreased food security; and the geopolitical ramifications of these events, including mass movement of people within/ across borders (and the subsequent conflict in the places where they arrive uninvited), along with the economic upheaval that will accompany this. Designing the adaptation to this scenario becomes increasingly essential, and there is an imperative to both recognise current and create new human existences that have the ability to do so. Indeed, the agency of ‘design’ and necessity of ‘designing activity’ in responding, mitigating and adapting to an increasingly turbulent and uncertain future ahead is clear. It is understood within a sector of the design community that if we (humans) and design (as a practice/profession) are going to have a future, the scope and objective of design is going to have to change dramatically. However, in the West, the rhetoric of sustainability, sustainable design and sustainable development are all rooted in maintaining the status quo, primarily relying on technological means to deliver us from our sins: fundamentally not recognising the Western/globalised hegemonic being-in-the-world as inherently defuturing. ‘Sustainability’ and ‘sustainable

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design/development’ have the same ideological origins as that of ‘development’, which is rooted in the global capitalist economy of perpetual growth, thus this trajectory does not offer us opportunities for a decolonial position. Top-down global and national governance responses can only partly respond to the scenario facing us, and many of these responses will seek to maintain current international power dynamics – not only failing to respond adequately for those at the margins who are more vulnerable to the impacts of the coming future, but continuing to exacerbate this situation and exploit ‘the margins’ for the sake of ‘the core’. Governments of developing nations are already barely able (or are unwilling) to provide basic support for those citizens at the margins, and are often held ransom by global economic agents that perpetuate models of dependency. Clearly, waiting for governments to solve the problem is of no use. We are in an urgent position where ‘design’ has created and is continuing to contribute to extreme defuturing and instability. At the same time, designers and design thinkers are realising the agency of design in responding to this context and creating alternative futures and designing for adaptation. The task of design needs to involve redesigning ourselves (Fry 2012); redesigning the way we (humans) live on and use this planet and its resources in a manner that is not ‘defuturing’ while creating futures that are able to respond and adapt to the changing climate. If we consider the need for adaptation by design, the adaptiveness and flexibility of the ‘designers’ discussed earlier offer us a valuable perspective in seeking to reimagine design practice. Given that the history of the Angolan people is one of being successively ‘remade’ (by colonisation, by independence, by war, by urbanisation, by Marxism then capitalism), what can their experience teach us (humans) about ‘remaking’ ourselves as a species? We must valorise the knowledge and skill embodied in our experiences to create new ways of dwelling in the world. It needs to be acknowledged that many societies existing outside of the Western ‘core’ had sustaining lifestyles that have been lost or changed as a result of the aggressive expansion of Western hegemony through colonisation/modernisation, and now globalisation. As global capitalism continues to remake us, we forget how to be adaptive and flexible, how to live with what we have at hand. The case studies discussed represent an attempt to start unveiling marginal practices of designing activity that offer potential for the (re)creation of other ways-of-being, supporting the pluriversal (Escobar 2011) project. Designers operating in this decolonial context are in a position to unveil and valorise ‘options’ for alternate futures. It is up to us to create these alternate futures, rather than waiting for solutions to arrive from the ‘core’. Walter Mignolo identifies ‘decolonial aesthetics’ as an artistic project that confronts a world overflowed with commodities and ‘information’ that invade the living space of ‘consumers’ and confine their creative and imaginative potential … Decolonial aesthetics [have] joined the liberation of sensing and sensibilities trapped by modernity and its darker side: coloniality. (Mignolo et al. 2011)

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If decolonial aesthetics mobilises art to expose the perpetuation of the colonial model enacted in contemporary practices (of which ‘design’ is clearly an active participant), design can equally be mobilised within a decolonial framework, not only to ‘unconceal’ but to reconstruct, recreate and rebuild another mode of being. The past remade anew as the sustainable has real potential. … What is being evoked here is nothing to do with the manufacture of commodities for sale in the existing market place but a far more ambitious project: the rematerialization of the culture by making new forms, knowledge and values from the old that, above all, recreate a sustaining social ecology as a foundation of change. (Fry 2009, p. 102) What follows is a preliminary outline of the scope of a decolonial design practice, within the Angolan context. We identify four areas of intervention, and put forward some ideas of what projects might constitute the beginnings of such a design practice.

Framework for design as a decolonial agent 1. Re-integration of culture and economy This involves designing a shift from the current economic structure (characterised by cultures of consumption and ‘cultural consumption’ (Chan 2010, p. 290) enjoyed by a global minority; and exploitative/environmentally destructive production) to one of localised economies characterised by cultural production, with participation-as-consumption. Arturo Escobar (2008, pp. 74, 455) calls for ‘other ways of thinking about and organizing material and social life’ which requires ‘investigation of local models of the economy; these are deeply informed by local culture, even though they exist not in isolation but in their engagement with dominant models’. There are four design approaches required to move towards this shift. First, different models of production and consumption (and the necessary structures supporting this) need to be designed: ‘production’ now entails not only the producing of goods and materials, but also practices and rituals; communities and identities. ‘Consumption’ shifts from purchasing to participating. Second, the values of these alternate modes of production and consumption need to be communicated. In layman’s terms: in order to counter the capitalist hegemony, these alternate options need to be not only made visible, but made desirable. Third, a reconceptualisation of ‘culture’ needs to be designed: the association of ‘culture’ as either concerning the ‘traditional’ or as ‘art’ needs to shift to an understanding of culture as being inherent to groups of human beings: always in flux, dynamic, changing, placebased (and therefore, a potential site of ‘futuring’ practices). Following on from this, the fourth approach is to utilise design in revealing ‘cultural production’ as it exists in unexpected places, valorising the innovative practices and adaptability that exists around us on a daily basis. The aim of these design strategies is to create

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practices that allow people to become ‘economy makers’ in the sense that ‘the economy’ is something they do, not that is done to them’ (Escobar 2008, p. 100).

2. Recovery, rediscovery and new connections This strategy involves the assembling and curating of a disparate array of practices (some old, some new, some forgotten or requiring rediscovery) that comes to act as a foundational resource from which ‘futuring’ practices and traditions can be appropriated, reinvented and remade anew as ‘sustaining’ ways of being. Arturo Escobar argues for ‘the retrieval of history making skills’ that seek to bring back a contextualised and situated notion of human practice that contrasts with the detached view of people and things … People live at their best, they maintain, when engaged in acts of history making, meaning the ability to engage in the ontological act of disclosing new ways of being and transforming the ways in which they deal with themselves in the world. (Escobar 2008, p. 99) This project has three areas of focus: the recovery of practices and traditions ‘here’ that have been erased or are in the process of being erased/marginalised; the rediscovery of alternate or ‘border’ practices that exist today yet may not necessarily be linked to the ‘traditional’ (these may be practices that have arisen out of necessity or hardship, occur in unexpected spaces, and are taken for granted or undervalued); and the creation of new connections with practices that are occurring or have emerged in other ‘border’ territories, highlighting the opportunities that can arise from collaborations that occur within the margins. This foundation becomes a design resource available for the creation of innovative new practices.

3. Designing desires and aspirations One of design’s most effective strategies is the mobilisation of desire in serving a global capitalist economy. While Arturo Escobar (2008, p. 109) wonders whether the creation of localised economies would suffice ‘to lessen the increasingly strong desire for commodity among the young’, we propose that this is exactly the design task that a decolonial design practice has in front of it. In the face of a globally expanding middle class who are buying the Western image of a successful lifestyle that has arrived through televisual means (and the subsequent discussion within the Western world of what the carrying capacity of the planet is if everybody lived like those in the West), it is necessary to create alternate ‘options’ that are desirable and can be aspired to. This involves a redefinition and communication of what might constitute ‘the good life’: the making visible of alternate cultures, alternate visions of success, and alternate conceptions of leisure. The scope of this approach is broad, encompassing all disciplines of design, and mobilising design practice’s fixation on material and aesthetic concerns in order to create decolonial ‘options’.

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4. Design as unconcealment This last strategy recognises design’s ability to act both as an agent of concealment and its nascent potential to ‘unconceal’ (Fry 2009, pp. 212–213). In this instance, we are proposing that design can be employed to unconceal the workings of ‘colonial matrix of power’ (Mignolo 2011, pp. 1–24) and the destruction (environmental, social) that this perpetuates. The Transnational Decolonial Institute notes that ‘Coloniality does not operate anymore on tobacco production or on the slave trade but on the control of global finances, public opinion and subjectivity in order to perpetuate and magnify the salvationist rhetoric of modernity’ and proposes that the project of decolonial aesthetics involves the ‘unveiling the hegemonic legitimacy of “knowledge” intrinsic to modernity, which denies agency and validation to the identities it constructed in the first place’ (The Transnational Decolonial Institute 2011). A design of unconcealment needs first to expose the contemporary globalised economy as one of unequal exchanges and exploitation (exposing who are the winners and losers, both internationally and nationally/locally); second to expose the long-term destructive consequences of such a system – futures characterised by environmental destruction, reduced food security, displacement of populations and conflict; and third to position design as a relational activity that is inherently political, dismantling the notion of design as a ‘neutral’ or apolitical practice, exposing the interconnectedness that design always has with society, economy, politics and power relations. This strategy has multiple audiences (one of which is designers themselves) and becomes embedded in the first three strategies outlined above. This framework represents an interrogation of the history of both the modern/ colonial world order, and how design operated as an actor within this system. It is an initial attempt to outline design practices that enable a move beyond the current global world order, in the face of a global future that will be characterised by climatic, economic and geopolitical instability. Design becomes an agent in creating alternative ‘decolonial’ futures. We have outlined the beginnings of a framework for decolonial design practice – this should be seen as an invitation (to appropriate, to refine, to contribute). While we retain a focus on the Angolan context, the approach and certain elements of the framework may find applicability in other places; equally the work occurring in other places can inform decolonial activities here. While we have broken the framework into various strategies, they are all interconnected. It is important that whatever action is undertaken, whatever the scale, a relational focus is maintained. The historic instrumentalisation of disciplines has resulted in contemporary practices which are disconnected from the complexity of the context in which they operate. If we are to create truly sustaining ‘futures’ all designing action must be undertaken in relation to and with awareness of a larger decolonial project.

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Notes 1 The ‘Berlin Conference’ was held in 1884–1885 in Berlin, with the participation of 14 European nations. 2 This is a reference to the poem ‘Havemos de Voltar’ (‘we must return’ or ‘we must go back’) by first Angolan president Agostinho Neto. Full poem available at: www. agostinhoneto.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=561:desterro&ca tid=45:sagrada-esperanca&Itemid=233. 3 Jiat-Hwee Chang’s article discusses similar dynamics embedded in British ‘tropical modernism’ in newly independent African nations (Chang 2010). 4 ‘M’Afrique Collection’, Moroso, www.moroso.it/home_moroso.php?n=products&mode l=205&tipologia=pol&l=en (accessed 29 April 2013). 5 Personal interview with Sr. Evangelista Jorge da Silva by authors, 30 March 2013, trans. H. Pereira and C. Gillett.

References Afropop Worldwide 2012, ‘Marissa Moorman: The Essential Hip Deep Interview’, www. afropop.org/wp/5165/marissa-moorman-the-master-interview (accessed 27 April 2013). Alvares, C. 1980, Homo Faber: Technology and Culture in India, China and the West from 1500 to the Present Day, Nijhoff, The Hague. Bender, G. J. 1978, Angola Under the Portuguese: The Myth and the Reality, University of California Press, Berkeley. BonTempo, J. 2010, ‘Bruce Nussbaum: The New Imperialism’, MIT Ideas Global Challenge, web log comment, 9 July 2010, http://mitpsc.mit.edu/globalchallenge/ ?p=417 (accessed 29 April 2013). Borges Coelho, J. P. 2003, ‘Da violência colonial ordenada à ordem pós-colonial violenta: Sobre um legado das guerras coloniais nas ex-colónias portuguesas’, in Lusotopie, Violences et contrôle de la violence au Brésil, en Afrique et à Goa, Karthala, Paris. Castro-Gómez, S. 2007, ‘The Missing Chapter of Empire’, Cultural Studies, vol. 21, pp. 428–448. Chabal, P. 2007, ‘Rebels and Robbers: Violence in Post-Colonial Angola’, The International Journal of African Historical Studies, vol. 40, no. 2, pp. 321–322. Chabal, P. 2009, Africa: The Politics of Suffering and Smiling, Zed Books, London. Chan, T. W. (ed.) 2010, Social Status and Cultural Consumption, Cambridge University Press, Leiden. Chang, J. H., 2010, ‘Building a Colonial Technoscientific Network: Tropical Architecture, Building Science and the Politics of Decolonization’, in D. Lu (ed.) Third World Modernism: Architecture, Development and Identity, Taylor & Francis, Hoboken, NJ. Change Observer 2010, ‘Humanitarian Design vs. Design Imperialism: Debate Summary’, Change Observer, 16 July 2010, http://changeobserver.designobserver.com/feature/ humanitarian-design-vs-design-imperialism-debate-summary/14498/ (accessed 29 April 2013). Daniels, S. 2010, Making Do: Innovation in Kenya’s Informal Economy, August, http:// makingdo.analoguedigital.com (accessed 29 April 2013). Delgado, L. E. and Romero, R. J. 2000, ‘Local Histories and Global Designs: An Interview with Walter Mignolo’, Discourse, vol. 22, no. 3, pp. 7–33. de Sousa Santos, B. 2012, ‘Mozambique: Another Victim of the Resource Curse?’ BUALA – African Contemporary Culture, 6 December 2012, www.buala.org/en/to-read/ mozambique-another-victim-of-the-resource-curse (accessed 29 April 2013).

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Downie, K. 2012, ‘Social Design Series – Cameron Tonkinwise: A Typology of Social Design’, Social Design Practice, 19 March 2012, http://socialdesignpractice.wordpress. com/2012/03/19/social-design-series-cameron-tonkinwise-a-typology-of-socialdesign (accessed 27 April 2013). Dutta, A. 2008, ‘Review of Modern Architecture and the End of Empire, by M. Crinson’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, vol. 67, no. 2, pp. 292–293. Escobar, A. 2004, ‘Development, Violence and the New Imperial Order’, Development, vol. 47, no. 1, pp. 15–21. Escobar, A. 2008, Territories of Difference, Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Escobar, A. 2011, ‘Sustainability: Design for the Pluriverse’, Development, vol. 54, pp. 137–140. Fernandes, J. M. 2011, ‘Arquitectura Moderna Portuguesa na África Subsaharianana’, in R. G. Prado and P. N. Martí (eds) La Modernidad Ignorada: Arquitectura de Luanda, Universidad de Alcalá, Alcalá de Henares. Fry, T. 1999, A New Design Philosophy: An Introduction to Defuturing, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney. Fry, T. 2009, Design Futuring: Sustainability, Ethics and New Practice, Berg, London. Fry, T. 2012, Becoming Human by Design, Berg, London. Huppatz, D. J. 2010, ‘Jean Prouvé’s Maison Tropicale: The Poetics of the Colonial Object’, Design Issues, vol. 26, no. 4, pp. 32–44. Jacobs, J. 1962, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jonathan Cape, London. Lança, M. 2011, ‘Lusosphere is a bubble’, BUALA – African contemporary culture, 3 October 2011, www.buala.org/en/to-read/lusosphere-is-a-bubble (accessed 27 April 2013). le Billon, P. 2001, ‘Angola’s Political Economy of War: The Role of Oil and Diamonds, 1975–2000’, African Affairs, vol. 100, no. 398, pp. 55–80. Lévi-Strauss, C. 1966, The Savage Mind, University of Chicago Press, IL. Lu, D. 2010a, ‘Architecture, Modernity, and Knowledge’, Fabrications: The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, vol. 19, no. 2, pp. 144–161. Lu, D. 2010b, ‘Introduction: Architecture, Modernity and Identity in the Third World’, in D. Lu (ed.) Third World Modernism: Architecture, Development and Identity, Taylor & Francis, Hoboken, NJ. Matthews, G. 2000, Global Culture/Individual Identity: Searching for Home in the Cultural Supermarket. Routledge, New York. Meijer, G. and Birmingham, D. 2004, ‘Angola from Past to Present’, Accord: An International Review of Peace Initiatives, vol. 15, pp. 10–15. Mignolo, W. 2009, ‘Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and Decolonial Freedom’, Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 26, pp. 159–181. Mignolo, W. 2011, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options, Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Mignolo, W., Lockward, A., Vásquez, R., Nerio, T. M. D., Grzinic, M., Eistrup, M., Ostojic, T., Benfield, D. M., Ferrera, R. M., Balanquet, Lasch, P., Torres, N. M., Tichindeleanu, O., Rojas-Sotelo, M. 2011, ‘The Argument (as manifesto for decolonial aesthetics)’, Center for Global Studies and the Humanities, Duke University, web log post, 22 May, https://globalstudies.trinity.duke.edu/the-argument-as-manifesto-fordecolonial-aesthetics (accessed 29 June 2013). Milheiro, A. V. 2012, Nos Trópicos sem Le Corbusier: Arquitectura luso-africana no Estado Novo, trans. H. Pereira and C. Gillett, Relógio D’Água, Lisboa.

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Neto, M. da C. 1997, ‘Ideologias, contradições e mistificações da colonização de angola no século xx’, in Lusotopie, Lusotropicalisme: idéologies coloniales et identités nationales dans les mondes lusophones, Karthala, Paris. Nussbaum, B. 2010, ‘Is Humanitarian Design the New Imperialism?’ Co.Design, web log post, 6 July, www.fastcodesign.com/1661859/is-humanitarian-design-the-newimperialism (accessed 27 April 2013). Pereira, J. M. N. 2000, ‘Mário de Andrade e o lusotropicalismo’, Centro de Estudos AfroAsiáticos – Universidade Candido Mendes, Rio de Janeiro. Prakash, V. 2010, ‘Epilogue: Third World Modernism, or Just Modernism’, in D. Lu (ed.) Third World Modernism: Architecture, Development and Identity, Taylor & Francis, Hoboken, NJ. Siegert, N. and Alisch, S. 2012, ‘Angolanidade revisited: Kuduro’, BUALA – African contemporary culture, web log post, 27 May 2012, www.buala.org/en/stages/ angolanidade-revisited-kuduro (accessed 29 April 2013). Sudjic, D. 2009, ‘Introduction: A World Drowning in Objects’, in D. Sudjic (ed.) The Language of Things: Understanding the World of Desirable Objects, W.W. Norton and Co, New York. Sylvanus, N. 2007, ‘The Fabric of Africanity: Tracing the Global Threads of Authenticity’, Anthropological Theory, vol. 7, pp. 201–216. The Transnational Decolonial Institute 2011, ‘Decolonial Aesthetics (I)’, web log post, 22 May 2011, http://transnationaldecolonialinstitute.wordpress.com/decolonialaesthetics (accessed 29 June 2013). Van Eeden, J. 2004, ‘The Colonial Gaze: Imperialism, Myths, and South African Popular Culture’, Design Issues, vol. 20, no. 2, pp. 18–33. Weeks, S. 2013, ‘Slavery by any Other Name: African Life Under Company Rule in Colonial Mozambique’, Cadernos de Estudos Africanos, vol. 25, pp. 209–212.

7 COUNTER-MAPPING AND GLOBALISM Peter Alec Hall

To begin, two images of Enlightenment’s optimism might be summoned to a convenient web browser: Thomas Hobbes’s (1651) Leviathan, illustrating the Body Politik in the giant torso of a sovereign straddling the landscape; and Gerardus Mercator’s (1609) engraving of Atlas as a ‘quiet and seated scientist holding the globe in his hand’ (as opposed to a God shouldering the burden).1 Modernity’s crisis of confidence in progress, political representation and a shared sense of the global might be attributed to the failure of both conceits: Hobbes’s vision of a society made civil and Mercator’s globe made manageable in the age of discovery. We are now perhaps more acutely aware that the Body Politik and the hand-held globe were only ever conceived from a particular perspective and by eliminating contradictory interests through a process of exclusion. So if the project has failed, what is the role of mapping as a means of representation today? As the spatial arrangement of represented entities, a map or visualisation can strive to reveal complex networks of conflicting interests, flows and environmental change in the era of globalism. Maps and visualisations of weather patterns, oil spills, temperature and CO2 levels, refugee paths of flight and so on can be accessed in an instant. But to what extent can mappings and visualisations be mobilised against the dominant forces that have brought us to the current crisis of confidence, confidence in a viable future? To explore this question I will first address the curious deficit of critique in data visualisation and mapping discourse, seemingly exacerbated by an epistemological gap between the related disciplines of computer sciences and geography; then I will explore the challenges of turning these tools of representation against the powerful interests that have traditionally wielded them; finally I will discuss how efforts to theorise and mobilise a resistance in mapping are manifest in repeated efforts to redefine and rewrite space, the emphasis being on a lexical as well as visual representation. Ultimately this leads to a conclusion that a map or visualisation by itself is doomed to remain gestural unless it is part of what

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Bruno Latour (1986, p. 17) calls a ‘cascade of inscriptions’ that bring to the table the accumulated power of an assembly of allies and interests.

Critique and visualisation The contemporary ‘state of the art’ in mapping is Geographic Information Systems (GIS), which brings together cartography and data visualisation in a powerful technological package, enabling its developers and users to bring any number of informational layers to the surface of a base map. This convergence of disciplines – cartography, computer science, statistics among them – has happened with such rapidity and technological fanfare that critical reflexivity has been largely left behind.2 That the burgeoning language of data visualisation has a history indebted to cartography is usually neglected in the dominant discourse of the computer sciences. Key texts in the field (e.g. Ware 2000; Card et al. 1983) typically draw from a positivist conception of cognitive psychology based on testing and codifying principles of perception that can be, supposedly, universalised. This approach is critiqued as an ‘engineering sensibility’ by Johanna Drucker (2009, pp. 72–3),3 who counters from a perspective of theories of subjectivity in feminist and cultural studies. We need only a trace of a pre-twentieth-century history of visualisation to scrutinise the engineering sensibility, and locate its connection to what geographer Jeremy Crampton (2010, p. 9) calls ‘technologies of management’ such as statistics and the emergence of a theory of probability that emerged with data visualisation in the nineteenth century. The specific practice of plotting scientific data against a representation of territory, in turn, finds earlier examples in the Age of Discovery: Edmond Halley’s seminal thematic 1686 map of trade winds, for example, introduces the graphic device of directional strokes and arrows to approximate the complex system of winds in the Atlantic around the tropics. Edmond Halley establishes several conventions to position the map-maker at the centre of the world: his use of the Mercator projection, of graticule and of London as the prime meridian. By the nineteenth century, these conventions had become undisputed ‘facts’.4 The discovery of the globe as a measurable whole, as several commentators have shown, emerged alongside the problem of how to order it.5 Since the scope of this chapter is the visual representation of geopolitical space, we shall endeavour to limit ourselves to discussion of the processes by which territorial interests are translated into, and reinforced by, visual form. Bruno Latour’s (1986, p. 7) concept of the ‘immutable mobile’ is a particularly robust account of how a map achieves this translation of power. Once a territory is framed, surveyed, coded, represented, authorised and fixed in a medium, be it in print or more seemingly fluid interactive forms such as GIS, it becomes both resistant to alteration (‘immutable’) and mobile; an instrument for preserving the meaning and truth of a scientific observation as it circulates. Bruno Latour compares a map drawn in the sand by an indigenous islander on Sakhalin with a copy of the sand map transcribed in the notebook of the explorer Jean-François de La Pérouse, in an expedition funded by Louis XVI. The former is

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allowed to disintegrate with the tide, whereas the latter, rendered in portable form, is the single object of the explorer’s mission, ‘to determine who will own this and that part of the world and along which routes the next ships should sail’ (Latour 1986, p. 5). Both the sand map and the notebook map carry the same valuable information, but the latter bears the characteristics of being the first in a ‘cascade of inscriptions’: it is mobile (unlike the sand map, or the island itself), immutable and flat, it can be reproduced, scaled and recombined at will, merged with geometry and made part of a written text. All of these acts of reproduction and mobilisation form the cascade of subsequent inscriptions. In the hands of the French empire, then, this ‘incredibly weak and fragile’ piece of paper becomes a means with which to ‘dominate all things and all people’ (Latour 1986, p. 29). But if its track record is entangled with imperialist histories, a map or inscription can surely also be deployed to serve the interests of the disempowered and marginalised. The act of plotting and representing marginalised interests, and here we might add non-human interests to the list, was usefully described as ‘counter-mapping’ by geographer Nancy Peluso (1995). In her paper on the counter-mapping of Indonesian forests undertaken in the 1990s by local activists and villagers in resistance to decades of intensive industrial timber exploitation and the Indonesian government’s use of mapping to override customary forest rights, Nancy Peluso (1995, pp. 384–5) characterises counter-mapping as efforts to ‘appropriate the state’s “techniques and manner of representation”’ (italics added). The aim is to ‘reinvent’ customary claims to forest resources, which have been traditionally and sustainably managed by villages.

Counter-mapping and the postmodern condition The rich history of counter-mapping and critical cartography is not documented in lavish atlases and the giant drawers in map rooms of the world’s libraries. This is not simply a reflection of where the power lies but also that counter-mapping always begins with a critique of the map: its first target is the map as an authoritative artefact frozen in time. Mapping, which describes the process of selecting and plotting information spatially, draws our attention to the means, method and circumstances under which the final representation was assembled. As such, it opens up for inspection the interests the map serves and suggests a way of looking beyond the finished artefact. This is why counter-mapping is always a practice and a process in flux:6 it suggests an activity that is generative, revealing, enabling, performative and participatory. After a decade of rhetoric on the generative, participatory nature of the architectural diagram,7 it is not the goal of this chapter to perpetuate the idea that the exquisite gestural representations of flows of traffic, history, geology, etc. by architects and planners constitute a new ‘movement’ in design. The aim instead is to explore the limits and potential of mapping as a means of representing interests now that its political history has been exposed. That maps embody a rhetoric of neutrality that fosters an illusion of democracy is, by now, thoroughly explored.8

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But the concern with ‘how we represent the world to ourselves’ (Harvey 1990, p. 240) is arguably what has prompted the proliferation of maps and visualisations in the last few decades. The postmodern condition was in effect transformed into a provocation by Frederic Jameson when he suggested in 1991 that the ‘incapacity of our minds, at least at present, to map the great global multinational and decentred communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects’ might be resolved via an ‘aesthetics of cognitive mapping’ (Jameson 1991, p. 44). While Fredric Jameson’s hypothesis has been tested in countless subsequent mapping projects, its emphatic case for an aesthetics of ‘cognitive mapping’ calls for a closer inspection of the term. Cognitive mapping emerged in the 1950s as a field research method for evaluating the ‘legibility’ of urban space, a concept furthered by urban planner Kevin Lynch (1960). By asking residents of a city to sketch a map and respond to questions about the built environment, Kevin Lynch argued that a shared sense could be derived of urban legibility, i.e. ‘the ease with which [a city’s] parts can be recognized and organized in a coherent pattern’ (Lynch 1960, pp. 2–3). Appealingly low-tech and accessible (particularly in the present age of more high-tech successors), Kevin Lynch’s method nevertheless makes several assumptions. Inherent in the phrase ‘urban legibility’ is the assumption that space can be ‘read’, suggesting a pre-existing text that presents itself for contemplation. As we shall see, this assumption has drawn criticism, notably from the anthropologist Tim Ingold.9 But even at the most literal level, the lexical bias encourages a focus in Kevin Lynch’s methods on fixed or written and therefore received representations. As a result, cognitive maps when sketched have a tendency to represent the world not as it is experienced, but an image of the world as it has been represented to us in print or on screen. Janet Vertesi’s paper on cognitive maps of London revealed a tendency among locals to view the city in terms of the city’s influential underground map (Vertesi 2008). Similarly, the sketch map study made by the geographer Thomas Saarinen in the early 1970s to examine how children pictured maps of the world, elicited received mental images of the world: after 3,800 children from various continents were asked to produce freehand sketch maps, Thomas Saarinen found there was a tendency, stronger in certain countries, to distort the maps to favour Europe, enlarging the continent and putting it at the centre (Saarinen 1987). This tendency even overshadowed an impulse to favour proximity and centre the countries the children were drawing from. For example, the orientation of a map composed of children’s world views puts the Soviet Union at the top right, USA top left and Europe in the centre, mimicking the classic Mercator projection. A particularly Eurocentric map drawn by Thai children in the 1970s reminds us that a map, as J. B. Harley wrote, replicates not just the territory but the ‘territorial imperatives of a particular political system’ (1984, p. 54). It would seem that, despite being the only country in South-East Asia not to have been colonised by a European power, Thailand has not been immune from the imperial activities around it. Here were the territorial imperatives of Carl Schmitt’s Grossraum, in

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which a dominant power seeks not annexation but to draw lands into its sphere of influence, vividly visualised in a child’s map.10 To move to the present day, Fredric Jameson’s call for cognitive mapping of the global order requires, in fact, a series of images. One challenge is that, like maps of the world, the notion of a single geopolitics has been thoroughly destabilised. The much-cited phrase of Donna Haraway, the ‘God-trick of seeing everything from nowhere’ is used to characterise the view of classical geopolitics (Haraway 1991, p. 189). Colin Flint’s account of contemporary geopolitics as ‘situated knowledges’ (Flint 2006, p. 16) mirrors the emergence of multiple, conflicting, representations of the world. We might begin with Ulrich Beck’s opening to his book What is Globalization? in which the nation-states are undermined by the transnational corporations that dominate the global operation of the economy (Beck 2000). Following a report in the Economist, we might draw a map depicting the largest transnational corporations instead of the dominant continents in Mercator’s projection: General Electric, Royal Dutch Shell, BP, Exxon Mobil and Toyota (Economist 2013). But where do we place them? GE and Exxon are American, BP is British, Shell is Dutch and Toyota Japanese, but of the 100 companies with the most foreign assets, the Economist tells us, 17 hold over 90 per cent of their assets abroad. If we sought to represent where the transnationals’ workforce is dispersed, it would become clear, as Beck notes, that the transnationals are located where labour costs and workplace obligations are the lowest. Over half the GE workforce is outside of the USA. We might draw the lines representing the flow of goods and services for these corporations, again connecting the places where infrastructure is favourable and labour is cheap. And finally, add some dollar signs, colour coded again, to show where these corporations pay taxes, and briefcases to show where their top executives choose to live. Clearly we arrive at something quite different from the Mercator projection. Ulrich Beck’s geopolitical map is in turn supplanted by the dazzling map of mega-regions, captured in satellite imagery of contiguously lighted areas at night, and redrawn by economist Richard Florida. Countering both the traditional nation-state map and the now popularised notion of the flattened world economy in which geographic place is less and less important, Richard Florida argues that geographic clustering and ‘pushing together’ of economic activity have reasserted the importance of place, in terms of economically and politically powerful mega-regions. Profiting from available labour, skilled talent, economic capacity and infrastructure, mega-regions define a two-tiered world order. Two mega-regions with common economic output are more likely to develop similarities in terms of culture, politics and built environments. But lagging behind are the ‘mega cities’ like Calcutta or Delhi, which share little in common with the mega-regions, nor can they look to the global economy for solutions or resources (Florida et al. 2008, p. 461).

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Lack of fit Ultimately, none of the geopolitical perspectives discussed above suggests a means of resistance to globalism. They depict the flows of power and capital, but ultimately reflect a dominant view of the world back to us, which serves to disempower rather than inspire the political action Jameson hoped for. At a global scale, the mapping of globalism sees only abstractions and generalisations. The same might be said of all the ‘big picture’ counter-mappings and counter-projections that sought to redress the Eurocentric imbalance of the Mercator projection: from Joaquin TorresGarcia’s America Invertida (1944) to ODT’s ‘What’s Up? South!’, both of which inverted the Mercator projection by showing the continents ‘upside down’. Since their target is the dominant signifier, they end up reinforcing it by protesting it. This is a complex design problem because the very tools that the under-represented need to make maps are shaped by those whose interests were served by the tools. A parallel can be drawn with post-colonial literature. The inadequacy of language for the post-colonial writer has been raised by several authors, including Salman Rushdie, who reflected on his ambiguity towards using English, the language of the coloniser, in terms of a struggle: ‘To conquer English may be to complete the process of making ourselves free’ (1992, p. 17). One group of editors of a volume of The Post-Colonial Studies Reader neatly describe the ‘lack of fit’ between language and place for those who inherit the language of the coloniser as a second language (Ashcroft et al. 2006, p. 345). The Canadian writer Dennis Lee has described the mismatch between English and the Canadian landscape: ‘The language was drenched with our non-belonging’ and ‘The colonial writer does not have words of his own’, he writes (cited in Ashcroft et al. 2006, p. 349). Is not the same true of the counter-mapper, crafting lines and shapes to give form that in turn struggles with its own loaded textures, weights and connotations? One of old cartography’s favourite textbooks, How to Lie with Maps, reveals a glib awareness that the mapmaker’s tools are intensively coded abstractions and techniques designed to simplify, select, displace, aggregate, abbreviate, make territory look ‘natural’ and most portentously, draw hard boundaries where there are none (Monmonier 1991). ‘Not only is it easy to lie with maps, it’s essential’, writes Monmonier (1991, p. 2), betraying the blithe embrace of positivism among the post-war cartographic establishment. After their wartime use for propaganda, the cartographic arts were strenuously repositioned as a technoscience, enabled in no small amount by the emergence of computers, databases and ultimately, GIS, which brings its own rhetoric of neutrality and precision. The result is a perpetuation of the black-box status of the map, whose codes are deeply embedded with the structures, values, techniques and hierarchy of practices of their colonial history. As Denis Wood has argued, ‘Maps mask the interests that bring them into being’ (1992, p. 95). That the very syntax of the map conceals its imperialistic Western cartographic development can be vividly illustrated by looking at the function and symbology of the legend. Since the majority of social practices and symbols at work in a

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cartographic map are silent conventions presented without explanation, the legend becomes a tell-tale index revealing what the mapmakers consider to be worth underlining. This, despite the widely held view that legends are neutral tools, ‘naturally indispensable to most maps since they provide the explanations of the various symbols used’ (Wood 1992, p. 97). Drawing from the work of J. B. Harley, Denis Wood has famously identified the territorial imperatives at work in a seemingly innocent road map of North Carolina by unravelling the signs. Denis Wood notes that the legend neglects to interpret 18 of the signs used in the map but provides signs for seven different kinds of road surfaces, along with the revealing factoid, ‘North Carolina’s highway system is the Nation’s largest State maintained Network. Hard-surfaced roads lead to virtually every scenic and vacation spot’. As Denis Wood puts it, the message of this map is one of ‘automotive sophistication’ (1992, pp. 95–107). Lack of fit becomes apparent when the dominant structures of cartography are put to the service of a counter-mapping project. Conventions around colour, for example, are clearly the product of specific cultural traditions for depicting landscapes: blue for water and green for vegetation make more sense in Northern Europe than in the Western Sahara. Seemingly impartial descriptive attributes such as ‘primary forest’ can have completely different meaning for a scientist, government official and an indigenous farmer (Rambaldi 2004). It becomes clear that there is a key conceptual difference between the cognitive sketch map and the everyday practice of experiencing space. In its rush to pragmatism, Kevin Lynch’s method of interviewing city dwellers and asking them to sketch their mental ‘image of the city’ rested on a centuries-old model of thought, one that assumed that the world ‘out there’ is processed ‘in here’, in the mind. This model, rooted in Cartesian dualism, is often described as a ‘transcendental’ account of cognition.11 An embodied account of thought, however, shifts this model to an experiential, situated and, recently, transactional understanding of how we encounter the world. Tim Ingold tackles the limitations of the cognitive model in his extended case for wayfinding in the environment, which suggests to him not a ‘great God-given maze’ but ‘an immensely variegated terrain of comings and goings, which is continually taking shape around the traveller even as the latter’s movements contribute to its formation’ (Ingold 2000, p. 223). This position is developed in a case study of tourists’ wayfinding practices by Eric Laurier and Barry Brown (2008). Eric Laurier and Barry Brown argue that classic cognitive studies of orientation and alignment with maps rely on ‘more or less disengaged cognitive models of navigation’ that ‘gloss numerous features of what ordinary navigators are doing with maps’. This is illustrated with detailed observations of tourists and car route navigators orientating themselves en route, where we see not mental reasoning and spatial models but: ‘map readers looking and reading signs, misunderstanding street names, grappling with more or less cumbersome paper documents and the like’ (Laurier and Brown 2008, p. 214). This key difference between transcendental and embodied accounts of thought also reflects back at us a contrast between Western and non-Western conceptions

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of territory, a distinction considered by a number of geographers in recent field work with beleaguered indigenous groups.

Indigenous cartographies In his account of a participatory mapping project in the Mosquitia region of Hondura, Joel Bryan (2011) notes the incompatibility of boundary lines with local understandings and practices of land use. Miskito villagers secured access to land and resources through networks organised in terms of kinship, residency and ancestry, notes Joel Bryan. These were conceived as overlapping and dynamic zones: Insofar as legal recognition required the resolution of these overlaps into boundary lines that could be titled and demarcated, they ran at cross purposes with the very forms of customary use and occupancy that they were intended to protect. This was, in many respects, an impossible task. (Bryan 2011, p. 41) Joel Bryan adds that it was ‘tactically necessary’ to deploy the representation techniques of Western cartography since indigenous communities in the region had seen the land they occupied increasingly encroached on by third-party land speculators and agriculturalists. Legal recognition of indigenous land rights had become crucial to stop the encroachment, but at the same time, writes Joel Bryan, producing those boundaries ‘carried the risk of disrupting villagers access to land and resources and becoming a source of conflict’ (Bryan 2011, p. 42). The ambivalence at the heart of the project is acutely felt by Joel Bryan, who was tasked with helping researchers from FINZMOS (the Federation of Indigenous and Native People of the Rio Segovia Zone) design and develop methodology for mapping indigenous claims to land. For all its rhetoric of empowerment, participatory mapping has been criticised for its capacity to extend neoliberal modes of governance by translating claims to territory and autonomy ‘in terms of the contractual freedoms associated with property ownership’ (Bryan 2011, p. 42). Efforts to chart boundaries and simultaneously reproduce the pre-existing forms of collective life that the boundaries precluded are recorded in vivid detail: Joel Bryan and his team of GPS-enabled researchers follow a local guide seemingly able to navigate indeterminate boundaries in the savannah by marking blazes on pine trees with a machete. At boundary markers, FINZMOS representatives signed agreements, written in Miskito, affirming villagers’ ‘rights to cross’ boundary lines in accordance with customary practices of use and occupancy. In walking the boundaries and validating the maps, Miskito organisations found new ways of creating new forms of relationships between communities, notes Joel Bryan, providing a means of critically assessing the potential of legal recognition and creating an awareness of other configurations of territory. The inscribed boundaries and ‘rights to cross’ agreements, in other words, both set up potential for protection and conflict. In conclusion, notes Joel Bryan (2011), the mapping

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simply opened up the need for more maps, an aspect of state mapping practices that indigenous mapping had sought to challenge. The ambivalence of this conclusion points to the impossibility of returning to a virginal, pre-mapped state. Once mapped, a territory is consigned to be continuously mapped. In her account of the negotiations between indigenous Karen communities and the Thai Royal Forestry Department in Thailand, Robin Roth identifies two opposing conceptions of space resembling Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s (1987) notions of smooth and striated space. The Thai Royal Forestry Department, which was seeking to establish a national park in the region, had Western-style maps to support its efforts to impose boundaries. The Karen, who had inhabited the area for over 1,000 years, did not see themselves as owners of the land – it was owned by spirits of land, water and forest. Their notion of the delineations between forest and agricultural land were ambiguous as a result of shifting cultivation practices: temporary private land is embedded within a communal framework. For example, a household in need can borrow land from a household within the village or a neighbouring village. After two rotation cycles the land becomes the ‘property’ of the borrower. At the same time, opportunistic gathering of chillies and vegetables (but not rice) from another’s field is practised. Citing Tim Ingold and Henri Lefebvre’s conceptions of space as something that is both rooted in social and ecological relations and dynamic, ‘in a constant state of becoming’, Robin Roth endeavoured to map Karen communities using the concept of ‘dwelling space’ instead of the abstract space of the Western cartographic map (Roth 2009, p. 211). Again, the project ended in ambivalence. Given the needs of the villagers to negotiate in the terms of the Western cartographic map, an uneasy compromise was achieved by Robin Roth training the Karen people to create ‘dynamic’ maps of land use. Nevertheless, Robin Roth’s case for mapping ‘dwelling space’ usefully draws from a Heideggerian account of space that Tim Ingold advocates in Perception of the Environment (2000). In place of the map that represents the earth as a ‘surface to be occupied rather than a world to be inhabited’, Tim Ingold argues for a conception of the world that ‘continually comes into being around the inhabitant’ (Ingold 2000, p. 143). Livelihood, with its practical, material and technical interactions with the environment cannot be understood as separate from myth, religion and ceremony. A hunter-gatherer pygmy group in Zaire, for example, builds dwellings that are relatively insubstantial and are regularly adapted to reflect the rifts, goings on between community members; a contrast to the often-unaddressed presumption in architecture, characterised as ‘first plan and build the houses, then import the people to occupy them’ (Ingold 2000, p. 180). To build a case for the validity of such alternative and counter knowledges, it is useful to refer to Jeremy Crampton’s diagram of contemporary mapping as a field of ‘knowledge and power relations’ being pulled in two different directions (Crampton 2010, p. 5). On one side of a compass-like circle are the experts pushing the securitisation of mapping, focusing on technical issues in isolation from their socio-political context. On the other side is the resistance: mapping as art, as amateur

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practice and as a force that has allowed the resurfacing of what Michel Foucault called ‘subjugated knowledges’. The resistance is further subdivided between those practitioners who critique mainstream GIS and cartography while supporting the geoweb and those who practise map art, performativity and counter-mapping. An example of the former group is the UK-based OpenStreetMap (OSM), which set out in 2004 to map the world using a crowdsourced, wiki-based system, whereby volunteers with handheld GPS uploaded data and imagery to the OSM server. To date, the platform has registered one million users, 30 per cent of whom have contributed at least one point to the map; the project has effectively forced the UK’s Ordnance Survey to relinquish its tight licensing and copyright controls on its maps, making geodata freely available (Gerlach 2010). While few would fail to be impressed with the power and promise of this wiki-based endeavour, OSM nevertheless reinforces the same visual syntax as its dominant rivals, and one would argue is ill-equipped to deal with the space of the modern city. The dominant form of the cartographic map can abstract slowmoving physical features like hills, trees, parks, buildings, rivers, infrastructure, and administrative and political boundaries like state and county lines and census blocks, but has never been very good at showing fast-moving, local things like vehicles or people, and even worse at showing the connections between those things; including the administrative, political and corporate jurisdictions and legislations that define modern city space. With the advent of GIS, we have a layered means of making cartographic tools more adept at revealing the mutability of space, but its machinery remains one aimed at scaling the local to the global. It tends to serve the forces that seek to profit from standardisation of space. This deficiency would explain why Jeremy Crampton is at pains to separate the resistance forces supporting the geoweb from those practising map art and counter-mapping. To help theorise the latter, Jeremy Crampton draws together threads that connect Gaston Bachelard’s ‘poetics of space’ with Martin Heidegger’s concept of dwelling and George Perec’s invitation to describe urban space in its banal ordinariness. Also cited is Michel de Certeau’s well-known contention that maps, or surveys of routes, end up negating or forgetting our being in the world, the ‘act itself of passing by’ (Crampton 2010, pp. 161–3). The recent work of many practitioners pulling in the map art and counter-mapping direction of Jeremy Crampton’s diagram is directly concerned with the visualisation of this ground-level experience. In the spirit of George Perec’s Species of Spaces (1974), I will now venture a tentative taxonomy of alternative conceptions of represented space: Air Space, Automated Space, and Ruptured Space.

Air Space At the most fundamental level, the space of the air we inhabit has been utterly transformed in a matter of decades: one simple conclusion from the work of philosopher Peter Sloterdijk is that the biophysical crisis has brought about a realisation that we humans exist in spheres of influence, in atmospheres that are shared.

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To define humans is to define the envelopes, the life support systems that make it possible for them to breathe. Peter Sloterdijk’s call for a new Rights of Man, ‘reformulated in topological terms’ points to the shift required for us to re-visualise contemporary space: all men are not only born free and equal but they’re all condemned to look after the space in which they live and ensure the breathability and livability of their environment. This definition concerns so-called private space as much as it does public space. Henceforth, the relationships between citizens are those of mutual poisoning. (Sloterdijk 2005, p. 230) This calls for a new metrics, to measure the extent of poisoning caused by our actions, which can be tied to the emergence in the 1980s of the concept of ‘environmental injustice’ designating the social impacts of environmental degradation. Efforts to correlate and visualise economic deprivation and environmental hazards are a significant counter-mapping endeavour, inevitably challenged, as Denis Wood has pointed out, by the extreme costs of compiling databases on the environment, which leads research groups to rely on often-problematic data sources provided by government and institutions (Thompson and Cacquard 2011). In a recent survey of contemporary mapping practices, Sébastien Cacquard concludes, depressingly, that the hyper-real perspective that Google has been producing through its pervasive mapping applications has come to seem brighter than the deteriorated environment to which it refers. Paraphrasing the novelist Michel Houellebecq, Sébastien Caquard offers the ‘disturbing’ provocation, ‘Google Maps are more interesting than the territory’ (Caquard 2013, p. 141). That the hyper-real perspective of a hegemonic mapping platform neglects to depict the deterioration, or poisoning, of air space is almost identical to the critique levelled by the BBC writers analysing a celebratory 1686 map of London produced under Charles I: both neglected to depict actual living conditions (BBC4 2010). But a significant distinction can be made between the slum and plague-ridden city of the early Enlightenment and today’s megalopolis, one alluded to earlier in Jameson’s characterisation of the ‘great global multinational and decentred communicational network’. At stake is our inability to visualise the colonisation of space by this network of interests. Curiously, one of the commercial organisations most associated with the democratisation of mapping tools is also implicated in this colonisation: Google.

Automated space Google is entangled in the redefinition of space in several ways. On the surface level it has become so prevalent a mapping platform that several critics have noted a homogenising effect in popular cartography: colour schemes have become less saturated, roads have been widened, fonts made uniform, to the effect that it has

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disseminated, perhaps unwittingly, a decidedly homogeneous version of the world devoid of geographical, political and cultural diversity, despite the variety of user groups adding information to its applications (Wallace 2009). But on another level, Google’s acquisition of a mapping platform in the early 2000s from the CIA-funded software company Keyhole was a strategic addition to its armoury. To add locative technology, to which we can now add the smart phone, to the world’s most powerful search engine enacts a disciplinary space quite unprecedented, one far beyond the panopticon first theorised by Michel Foucault.12 To tease out the threads of this entanglement requires a more dimensional and historical account of space, developed by geographers Nigel Thrift and Shaun French (2002). In the past 50 years or so, argue Nigel Thrift and Shaun French, the ‘technical substrate’ of Euro-American societies has been completely redefined as software has come to intervene in everyday life and at the same time assume an unchallenged, ‘taken-for-granted’ position in the background. Drawing from the ‘machine space’ identified by Ron Horvath in 1974, which described a desolate and threatening territory devoted primarily to the use of machines, Nigel Thrift and Shaun French extend the definition to describe space that is automatically produced: Wherever we go, then, in modern urbanized spaces, we are directed by software: driving in the car, stopping at the red light, crossing the road, getting into an elevator, using the washing machine or the dishwasher or the microwave, making a phone call, writing a letter, playing a CD or a computer game, the list goes on and on. (Thrift and French 2002, p. 323) The effectivity of this mechanically written space, they argue, stems from three different but intersecting geographies: a geography of software production, a geography of power and a geography of play. All three are situated by Nigel Thrift and Shaun French within critical discourse: software production is concentrated in the US, and characterised by hierarchies of places and people; its geography of power is interpreted in Foucauldian terms to describe how software is an expression of ‘rules of conduct’ which ‘operate at a distance’ so that ‘too often the code seems to have little to do with the situations in which it is applied’; and its geography of play is defined, optimistically it seems, in terms of its indeterminacy and lack of closure, which as properties that resist being captured by dominant orders, provide a means of creating ‘new kinds of order’ (Thrift and French 2002, p. 328). A decade after Nigel Thrift and Shaun French’s prescient provocation, automatically produced space is running rampant, and notably so in terms of wayfinding. Space is increasingly inscribed by software to the extent that where we go, why we go and what we do when we go is dictated through and by the smart phones, social media apps and satellite navigation systems we carry around with us. The Apple and Google maps on our smart phones also provide a cartographic view of

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the world that increasingly resembles a video game, one small horizonless screen at a time, in which obstacles are a nuisance and overall orientation is sacrificed for the expediency of getting to a single destination in the minimum amount of time.

Ruptured space Space is increasingly ruptured, by its automatic production, development, colonisation and, quite often, by disaster. The use of locative technologies to serve communities in re-connecting ruptured space seems to illustrate Nigel Thrift and Shaun French’s case for ‘new kinds of order’ emerging from the exploitation of software’s indeterminate nature. A case in point is the use of OSM as the basis for Ushahidi, an open source platform started in Kenya as a way of tracking postelection violence in 2007. Essentially a way to geo-locate reports sent to a website, the platform, together with its visualisation tool Crowdmap, translates, classifies and geo-references (using Google maps/OSM) reports sent by email, SMS, social media, traditional media and voice messages (for the illiterate) (Sheller 2012). In the wake of the Haitian earthquake of 2010, Ushahidi set up a Haitian crisis mapping operation through which people and organisations posted their needs, and volunteers translated and picked up geolocated requests, and reportedly helped save many lives. The cautionary addendum to this much-celebrated project is that very few Haitians had smart phones and broadband access after the disaster. As Mimi Sheller notes, this meant that the vantage points and centres of calculation for the relief effort were outside the country (Sheller 2012). Nevertheless, the mapping of post-disaster space usefully identifies a temporary space that rarely makes it onto a map, but has increasing relevance as we enter the worsening stages of biophysical crisis. To return to Jeremy Crampton’s diagram, the uneasy tension between securitisation and resistance suggests intriguing problems for the art of mapping resistant practices. Mapping post-disaster space brings up complex issues around data access and ownership. A mapping of least surveilled routes provides material for the next wave of cameras. A mapping that seeks to galvanise networks of hackers, grass roots activists and hacktivists also risks providing valuable information for criminal investigators and prosecutors. A security map of network vulnerabilities by the same token potentially provides a valuable tool for cyber-criminals. The sense of an impasse remains, however, only if we remain at the level of the map, the visualised outcome of acts of resistance. If instead we consider the acts themselves as part of specific, situated social movements, then the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of a map becomes a secondary concern. This first requires a rather different interpretation of Jeremy Crampton’s diagram using Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of deterritorialisation. This broad-ranging concept, describing the freeing of a possibility from its former state (Deleuze 1986), is often used to describe the transnational movement of cultures no longer anchored to place: the migration of people, the displacement of refugees, border-crossings and so on. Following anthropologist Arturo Escobar, we might attribute to the

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securitisation side the forces seek to globalise through systematisation of mapping, and to the resistance side the forces seek to localise. Both sides deploy technology to network their activities, the key distinction being that the strategies of securitisation practiced by the technoscientific establishment produce a delocalising effect due to their politics of scale (to map the globe requires the imposition of an abstract system upon it). But at the same time, the forces that seek to globalise are not, as a Marxist reading of Jeremy Crampton’s diagram might suggest, a single, unified bloc moving en masse. They too are engaged in processes of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation. Arturo Escobar proposes that we learn a feminist ‘radical critique of power’ that fractures this capitalocentric model of a unified bloc and replaces it with a set of scattered practices across the globe: ‘pluralising the identity of capitalism – capitalisms – demands … the discursive liberation of places (and the economy) from a total determination by capital, or modernity for that matter’ (Escobar 2001, p. 158). This move, characterised as giving capitalism an ‘identity crisis’ (GibsonGraham 1996, pp. 260–1) grants potency and autonomy to alternative models of development, or rather, post-development.13 It echoes the writings of many anthropologists on globalisation14 and establishes a framework for Arturo Escobar’s discussion of ecological and ethnic movements such as the alternative strategies for sustainable uses of bio-diverse resources practised by activists in the Colombian Pacific rainforest. Confronted with the rapid expansion of palm plantations and industrial shrimp cultivation in the south of this region, activists have initiated research of traditional production systems and redefined the entire Pacific rainforest region in terms of ‘life corridors’ that link people with the natural environment. For example, there are life corridors linked to mangrove ecosystems, foothills, traditional gold mining or women’s shell collecting in the mangrove areas. The point is not to reify or preserve indigenous practices as ‘untouched’ but to challenge the conceptual model that always characterises the local as succumbing to the global (Jacobs 1996, p. 15). We might also complicate Jeremy Crampton’s diagram with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s less polarised model of resistance and control, in which ‘Resistances are no longer marginal but active in the centre of a society that opens up in networks’ (Hardt and Negri 2000, pp. 24–5). In a disciplinary society, control was exercised in the form of public executions and punishments; today control is internalised in the social body, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argued. In short, it would seem that mapping against globalism first requires identifying where globalism has colonised us, our habitus, or the structuring structures that shape how we navigate the world. A prime reflection of this internalised battle is our ambivalent relationship with technology, which seems to cleave space itself, rupturing us from our immediate environment and suturing us to remote spaces. In his last book, Félix Guattari used exactly these terms, rupture and suture, for acts of deterritorialisation. A particularly resonant phrase suggests that counter-mapping is a resistant and fertile impulse in the bid to make sense of the conflicting interests that confront us in our daily

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lives. ‘Artistic cartographies have … never stopped being a vital element in the crystallisation of individual and collective subjectivities’ (Guattari 2006, p. 79).

Conclusion The thrust of this chapter has been to explore how visualisation and mapping against globalism has taken shape in the past and how it might take shape in the future. The idea that visualisation’s language – visual and textual – is indeterminate provides reason enough to see reinvention as both possible and inevitable amid the forces of globalism. But a Latourian analysis would remind us that to focus on the visualisation alone is to miss the point that the map is the synthesis or accumulation of interests into immutable form. The reason why an experimental map of indigenous dwelling space would likely not have been successful is because the community needed to mount a convincing counterargument, as opposed to formal innovation. In other words, a map or visualisation must always be understood as the mobilisation of interests, without which it is destined for failure: it is successful inasmuch as it can become immutable and mobile, by gathering support and preserving its claim to truth as it mobilises. This is why formal graphical innovation must always be the product of a groundswell of change to change anything; otherwise it is doomed to remain gestural and faddish. We are left to consider how the myths of human progress that are written into the language of cartography and visualisation might yet be countered with new myths. To paraphrase Claude Lévi-Strauss, myth is countered not by argument but by other myths.15 Arturo Escobar’s suggestion is that the capitalocentric myth of an ‘impossibly large monster that cannot be changed’ is a hindrance to the establishment of new myths, myths of alternative models, of meshworks of localised practices (Escobar 2001, pp. 161, 169). The challenge is simply put, as Audre Lorde (1984) would have it, that ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’.16 That the very syntax of visualisation and mapping is inscribed with the interests of the dominant forces that mobilised them, is a reminder that space must be re-imagined to be re-mapped.

Notes 1 The challenge of representation presented here draws on Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel’s project Making Things Public. See Latour (2005). 2 Jeremy Crampton (2010) opens with an account of this neglect. 3 Johanna Drucker posits an alternative approach to visualisation which acknowledges the situated nature of knowledge. To Johanna Drucker, the representation of human thought is characterised as ‘a continual attempt to open up space for subjectivity, individual expression, and specificity as challenges to the cultural authority of alignment, totalisation and systematic approaches to knowledge’ (Drucker 2009, p. 129). 4 Halley’s thematic map, titled cautiously ‘An Historical Account of the Trade Winds, and Monsoons, observable in the Seas between and near the Tropicks [sic]; with an attempt to assign the Phisical [sic] cause of the said Winds’, is discussed in detail in Thrower (1969).

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5 6 7 8

9 10 11

12 13 14 15 16

See, for example, Elden (2010, p. 21); Latour (2004, p. 461). Practice here is meant in the sense that Stan Allen (2009) positions it as discovery. See, for example, Garcia (2010). With his insightful focus on the ‘silences’ in maps that reveal their territorial imperatives, J. B. Harley has left a critical legacy that invites us to unravel the neutrality of maps through deconstruction of the close reading of signs, graticule, decoration, legends, and so on. Following Michel Foucault’s discursive analysis, J. B. Harley has shown how maps came to prominence with the rise of the nation-state, and how their principal patrons were nation-states who saw in them a means of plotting and controlling knowledge of estates, waterways, and political boundaries. Rather than see maps as means of navigation, we can thus investigate the development of maps and visual codes as the institutionalisation of power/knowledge (Harley 1984). See Ingold (2000). For a discussion of Carl Schmitt’s influence on contemporary international relations, see Elden (2010). See Alva Noë’s discussion of transcendental accounts of cognition in Noë (2012, pp. 1–11). Alva Noë writes, ‘the world does not show up as presented on a viewing screen; it shows up as the situation in which we find ourselves … We are always in the midst of making adjustments to the world around us’ (2012, pp. 3–4). See Burkeman (2012). Michel Foucault’s account of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon appears in Discipline and Punish (1975). Post-development theory challenges the assumption that a ‘developed’ world can impose a standard of progress on the rest of the world, identifying the origins of this assumption as President Truman’s 1949 speech. See Rahnema and Bawtree (1997). See, for example, Clifford (1989, 2012). For a discussion of Claude Lévi-Strauss and myth, see Lévi-Strauss (2013). See Lorde (1984).

References Agamben, G. 1998, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. D. Heller-Roazen, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA. Allen, S. 2009, Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation, 2nd edn, Routledge, London. Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G. and Tiffin, H. (eds) 2006, The Post Colonial Studies Reader, 2nd edn, Routledge, London. Austen, K. 2013, ‘Where in the World?’, New Scientist, 19 January, vol. 217, no. 2900. Bartholl, A. 2013, 15 Seconds of Fame, video screencast, http://datenform.de/15-secs-offame.html (accessed 1 October 2013). BBC4 2010, ‘City maps: Order out of chaos’, The Beauty of Maps, television broadcast, 20 April, www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p007hqrv (accessed 1 March 2013). Beck, U. 2000, What is Globalization?, trans. P. Camiller, Polity Press, Cambridge. Bryan, J. 2011, ‘Walking the line: Participatory mapping, indigenous rights, and neoliberalism’, Geoforum, vol. 42, no. 1, pp. 40–50. Burkeman, O. 2012, ‘How Google and Apple’s digital mapping is mapping us’, The Guardian, 28 August. Cacquard, S. 2013, ‘Cartography 1: Mapping narrative cartography’, Progress in Human Geography, pp. 135–44. Card, S., Moran, T. P. and Newell, A. 1983, The Psychology of Human–Computer Interaction, Erlbaum Associates, New Jersey. Clifford, J. 1989, ‘Notes on Travel and Theory’, Inscriptions, vol. 5, pp. 177–88. Clifford, J. 2012, ‘Feeling Historical’, Cultural Anthropology, vol. 27, no. 3, pp. 417–26.

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Crampton, J. 2010, Mapping: A Critical Introduction to Cartography and GIS, Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester. Deleuze, G. 1986, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam, University of Minnesota Press, MN. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. 1987, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, MN. Drucker, J. 2009, Speclab: Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative Computing, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. Economist 2012, ‘Biggest transnational companies’, 10 July, www.economist.com/blogs/ graphicdetail/2012/07/focus-1 (accessed 1 October 2013). Elden, S. 2010, ‘Reading Schmitt Geopolitically: Nomos, Territory and Grossraum’, Radical Philosophy, vol. 161 (May/June). Escobar, A. 2001, ‘Culture sits in places: Reflections on globalism and subaltern strategies of loacalization’, Political Geography, vol. 20, no. 2, pp. 139–74. Flint, C. 2006, Introduction to Geopolitics, Routledge, London. Florida, R., Gulden, T. and Mellander, C. 2008, ‘The Rise of the Mega-Region’, Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, vol. 1, pp. 459–76. Garcia, M. (ed.) 2010, Diagrams of Architecture: AD Reader. John Wiley & Sons, Chichester. Gerlach, J. 2010, ‘Vernacular mapping, and the ethics of what comes next’, Cartographica vol. 45, no. 3, pp. 165-8. Gibson-Graham, J. K. 1996, The End of Capitalism (as we knew it), Basil Blackwell, Oxford. Gordon, A. 2008, An Atlas of Radical Cartography, Journal of Aesthetics and Protest Press, New York. Guattari, F. 2006, ‘Chaosmosis: An ethico-aesthetic paradigm’, in C. Bishop (ed.) Participation, Whitechapel–MIT Press, London, original work published 1992. Haraway, D. 1991, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, Routledge, New York. Hardt, M. and Negri, A. 2000, Empire, Harvard University Press, MA. Harley, J. B. 1984, ‘Maps, knowledge and power’, in P. Laxton (ed.) 2001, The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD, pp. 52–81. Harvey, D. 1990, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, Blackwell, Oxford. Ingold, T. 2000, Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill, Routledge, New York. Institute for Applied Autonomy, c2002. i-See, www.appliedautonomy.com/isee.html (accessed 1 October 2013). Jacobs, J. 1996, Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City, Routledge, London. Jameson, F. 1991, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Kotkin, J. and Cox, W. 2013, ‘The World’s Fastest-Growing Megacities’, Forbes, April, www.forbes.com/sites/joelkotkin/2013/04/08/the-worlds-fastest-growing-megacities (accessed 1 October 2013). Kwan, M. 2002, ‘Feminist visualization: Re-envisioning GIS as a method in feminist geographic research’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 92, no. 4, pp. 645–61. Latour, B. 1986, ‘Visualisation and cognition: Drawing things together’, in H. Kuklick (ed.) Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present, vol. 6, pp. 1–40, www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/21-DRAWING-THINGS-TOGETHER-GB. pdf (accessed 1 October 2013).

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Latour, B. 2004, ‘Whose cosmos, which cosmopolitics?’, Common Knowledge, vol. 10, no. 3, pp. 450–62. Latour, B. 2005, ‘From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik, or how to make things public’, in B. Latour and P. Weibel (eds) Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Laurier, E. and Brown, B. 2008, ‘Rotating maps and readers: praxiological aspects of alignment and orientation’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series, vol. 22, pp. 201–16. Lee, D. 1974, ‘Cadence, country, silence: writing in colonial space’, Boundary 2, vol. 3, no. 1, in B. Ashcroft, G. Griffiths and H. Tiffin (eds) 2006, The Post Colonial Studies Reader, 2nd edn, Routledge, London. Lévi-Strauss, C. 2013, In Our Time, podcast, BBC Radio 4, 23 May, www.bbc.co.uk/ programmes/b01sjjxl (accessed 1 October 2013). Lorde, A. 1984, ‘The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’, in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, 2007, The Crossing Press, CA, pp. 110–13. Lynch, K. 1960, The Image of the City, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Monmonier, M. 1991, How to Lie With Maps, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. Noë, A. 2012, Varieties of Presence, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. ODT Inc. n.d., What’s Up? South, www.odt.org/pictureembed.htm (accessed 1 October 2013). Peluso, N. 1995, ‘Whose woods are these? Counter-mapping forest territories in Kalimantan, Indonesia’, Antipode, vol. 27, no. 4, pp. 383–406. Perec, G. 1997, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, trans. J. Sturrock, Penguin, London, original work published 1974. Rahnema, M. and Bawtree, V. 1997, The Post-Development Reader, Zed Books, London. Rambaldi, G. 2004, ‘Who Owns the Map Legend?’, paper presented at the 7th International Conference on GIS for Developing Countries (GISDECO 2004), 10–12 May 2004, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Johor, Malaysia. Roth, R. 2009, ‘The challenges of mapping complex indigenous spatiality: From abstract space to dwelling space’, Cultural Geographies, vol. 16, pp. 207–27. Rushdie, S. 1992, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–91, Granta, London. Saarinen, T. 1987, ‘Centering maps of the world: Discussion paper’, http://eric. ed.gov/?id=ED293738 (accessed 3 May 2013). Sassen, S. 1998, Globalization and its Discontents, The New Press, New York. Sheller, M. 2012, ‘The islanding effect: Post-disaster mobility systems and humanitarian logistics in Haiti’, Cultural Geographies, vol. 20, no. 2, pp. 185–204. Sletto, B. 2009, ‘Indigenous cartographies’, Cultural Geographies, vol. 16, no. 147. Sloterdijk, P. 2005, ‘Foreword to the theory of spheres’, in M. O’Hanian and J. Royoux, (eds) Cosmograms, Lukas and Sternberg, London, p. 230, original work published 2004. Soja, E. 1997, ‘Six Discourses on the postmetropolis’, in S. Westwood (ed.) Imagining Cities, Routledge, London. Thompson, U. and Cacquard, S. 2011, ‘Compiling a geographic database to study environmental injustice in Montréal: Process, results, and lessons’, in S. Caquard, L. Vaughan and W. Cartwright (eds) Mapping Environmental Issues in the City: Arts and Cartography Cross Perspectives, Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography, SpringerVerlag, Berlin. Thrift, N. and French, S. 2002, ‘The Automatic Production of Space’, in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series, vol. 27, no. 3, Wiley on behalf of The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers), London, pp. 309–35.

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Thrower, N. J. 1969, ‘Edmond Halley as a Thematic Geo-cartographer’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 59, no. 4, pp. 652–76. Ushahidi n.d., http://blog.ushahidi.com (accessed 2 October 2013). Vertesi, J. 2008, ‘Mind the Gap: The London Underground Map and Users’ Representations of Urban Space’, Social Studies of Science, vol. 38, no. 1, pp. 7–33. Wallace, T. 2009, ‘Has Google Homogenized our Landscape?’ in Association of American Geographers Conference, Las Vegas, 22–7 March. Ware, C. 2000, Information Visualization: Perception for Design, Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco, CA. Wolf, M. n.d., ‘Street View Fuck You’, http://photomichaelwolf.com/#fuck-you/4 (accessed 2 October 2013). Wood, D. with Fels, J. 1992, The Power of Maps, Routledge, London.

8 A NOTE FROM BRAZIL Looking at the production of design knowledge in Brazil Maria Cecilia Loschiavo dos Santos

Working with the homeless has been a process of exchange and of learning; a process that has marked my research interests and has given design and development new meaning in the context of São Paulo. Driven by the wish to understand a prevalent phenomenon of the twentieth century, the research, in the mid-1990s, involved the relation of design to aspects of the informal habitat of the homeless, looking especially at the character of life on the streets and the material aspects of the culture of the homeless. Informal habitat as created by the homeless was explored and investigated in relation to its impact on the urban environment of global cities, such as São Paulo, Los Angeles and Tokyo. Without a doubt, homeless culture in each of these three cities has its own specific causes, political, social and cultural components. But in each of these places the material culture of the homeless reveals their creativity, ingenuity and the spontaneity of their design. Accordingly, it needs to be stated that the material environment of the homeless culture is constructed from the trash of our technological and industrialised culture. These people create a world for themselves mostly out of plastic and cardboard; cities on the margins of, and also within, the spaces of our daily life. Facing the experience of diving vertiginously into the shadows, it is here that they mine for the materials, which allow the construction of a fragile habitat. Moved by the need for shelter, homeless people have transformed the concept of the city. As such they are both present and absent, seen and invisible, included and excluded. In every respect they simultaneously exist inside and outside the physical, social and political world and place themselves, willingly or unwillingly in an intermediate space. Every single homeless person has a history, a story, which is erased by that very classification of ‘homeless’, as well as neglected by policy makers. The study of the survival repertoires and ecologies of the homeless in São Paulo, Los Angeles and Tokyo took years to complete. It has become intertwined with other research about a phenomenon strongly connected to design: the development

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and spread of a massive urban rubbish excavation, catação. Moving from one regime of classification to another, this material moves from waste to resource, and thereafter becomes a source of survival. It provides the basis of a new economic strategy able to generate income and raw material from which aids to living can be provided or made. This action does not just provide homeless and other individual citizens in the major Brazilian cities with the means to meet their material needs, but also it is the matter from which the material culture is constructed; it is a lifeworld of necessity. Collecting and recycling discarded mass-produced objects and materials is now a central activity for catadores, who with their activism have created a strong social movement in Brazil, Movimento Nacional de Catadores de Materiais Recicláveis. More than this, they are also starting to be recognised as the providers of a public service, which contributes to the social and economic life of the city by improving its urban fabric through the re-use and elimination of waste. This is confirmed by research being conducted by a multi-disciplinary team of researchers at the University of São Paulo, led by Professor Loschiavo dos Santos. The objective of this work is to reach a better understanding of an economy that the homeless and the dispossessed create for themselves. More than this it also establishes that the informal knowledge the collectors acquire and communicate is of national significance; this being evident in support gained from the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development. In particular, the Council is interested in the relationship between product design, sustainability, solid waste issues and management, and the practices which collectors adopt. In 2010, the National Policy of Solid Waste – Law no. 12,305/2010 – was approved. The project researches the relationship between design and the law. Importantly within this context, there is also a requirement to study the relationship between design and consumer behaviour. As the research progressed the terms of analysis began to change. Increasingly, scholars started looking at the circumstances of the collectors and issues of social inclusion. In particular, they focused on issues of citizenship, gender and cultural experience. Some of these issues, and the questions associated with them, already have a vast body of work in the humanities and social literature, however, their appearance in design theory and practice is relatively new. Exemplary studies such as the Master’s dissertation by Gabriela de Gusmão Pereira, ‘On designing and surviving on the streets; an inventory of inventions’, looked at the environmental urban structures created by individuals who live or work on the streets of large urban centres. This particular study focused mainly on the city of Rio de Janeiro. The ethnographical approach adopted, illuminated the contribution of the street inhabitants themselves, in their designing of shelters, work tools, solid residual furniture, play objects, letterings or signs, as well as means of improving their physical health. Crucially, this research identified what the teaching staff of design schools around the world (who constantly create projects on design for the homeless), and thereafter thousands of students, fail to recognise, namely: that the only way homeless people will gain the means to improve their

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circumstance, self respect, dignity and the knowledge and skills to progress is by doing things themselves (de Gusmão Pereira 2004). How can students who know nothing about the life of such people, the complexity of homelessness beyond the immediate issue of being without shelter, possibly solve the problem, which is more logistical than structure centred? An additional case study that focuses on the organisation of collectors is Sylmara Gonçalves-Dias’ PhD thesis, ‘Collectors: a perspective of their inclusion in the recycling industry field’, which explored how men and women, usually homeless people, became organised to collect ‘useful’ garbage that could be recycled. She analysed the inclusion of cooperatives of collectors in the PET packaging recycling industry, through the evaluation of two collectives: the Rede Cata Sampa, based in São Paulo and Rede Cata Unidos, located in Minas Gerais. What this research made clear is that the solution to homelessness requires more than solving the problem of being without a home. It is essentially a problem about being without the means to sustain one’s being. So economy, material and social circumstances, shelter, organisation and knowledge all relationally converge as essential elements of the creation of solutions (Gonçalves-Dias 2009). This understanding was reflected in another PhD thesis by Ingrid Wanderley, who investigated the same subject matter via her project, ‘The design of the “others”: Creative interactions in contemporary artifact production’. Her major aim was to analyse the ways and practices of rethinking and transforming objects in everyday life. Such practices are a prime source of learning within the design process, and are often undervalued in terms of their potential. These practices raise questions about concepts such as ‘non-intentional design’ (NID), ‘low-cost design’, ‘spontaneous design’ and ‘non-design’ as part of an attempt to understand the dialogues and interactions between non-designers and designers, as well as questions of design and authorship (Wanderley 2013). Lara Barbosa’s doctorate thesis, ‘Design without borders: the relationship between nomadism and sustainability’ (Design sem fronteiras: a relação entre o nomadismo e a sustentabilidade), introduced the theme of nomadism in relation to sustainability through design. The hypothesis aimed to confirm that nomadism and sustainability are closely related and to underline the importance of designers incorporating these principles into their working process. The goal of the thesis was to generate innovative design directions by considering contemporary forms of nomadic life and environmental requirements (Barbosa 2009). All of the studies presented here are addressing the issue of what it means to live in the borderland between self-enablement and victimhood. An understanding of what it means and feels to be in this situation can only be known by people who are actually so positioned. However, it is important that the complexity of the lives of these people and their issues be recognised, otherwise stereotypical charitable approaches towards these people by ‘well-intended benefactors’ will continue to fail. Following this evidence, these studies show the potential of design research in marginalised populations in the context of their struggles. They reveal how unhelpful stereotypical thinking turns out to be by its insistence on ‘revealing’

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the life of the homeless as only the sombre and ugly, and by its romanticisation of homelessness as a life without the constraints of normal everyday life. In 2008, José de Souza Martins expressed his belief that the political and charitable discourse about street people is poor in content, because it neglects the imaginative competency of the poor. Therefore we face a contradiction that creates an abyss between a poor person who has a rich imagination, and those who say they are helping him, people who are comparatively rich, and are poor in imagination about poverty. (de Souza Martins 2008, p. 2) Survival, as life lived at its most basic, imposes its own language and culture (which can evidence a rich imagination). This is seen in those communities who create and occupy informal habitat and demonstrate a larger frame of Do It Yourself (DIY) logic with its ability to cycle the ‘used–abandoned–disposed of’ and the need to recycle or re-use it in other ways. The question raised by this is: ‘What are the consequences of recognising this practice by people who are deprived and respond by employing discarded materials, and in so doing establish Brazilian vernacular design?’ Philosopher Gilda de Mello e Souza, by deploying a broad-ranging thinking that recognises the role of design as a very important form of expression, gives us the key to an understanding of the aesthetic regime, the culture and the objects produced by the homeless population. Commenting on the inheritance of the first group of French professors – Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jean Maugüé, Roger Bastide – who all came to teach Aesthetics in the Philosophy Department of the University of São Paulo, she expressed and developed a concept based on the notion of the ‘rich aesthetic’ and the ‘poor aesthetic’ (estética pobre e estética rica), which is crucial to understanding the ephemeral aesthetic of vernacular design (Souza 1980). According to Gilda de Mello e Souza, in opposition to the Aesthetics of Classicism of Jean Maugüé and Claude Lévi-Strauss, and especially the analysis of Roger Bastide, which focused on another concept of art (specifically via the Aesthetics interests of an anthropologist, and a scholar of the phenomenon of religious mysticism), Roger Bastide arrived in a country he believed to be without a great cultural tradition and concentrated on the elaboration of the ‘poor aesthetic’. In reality though, what existed and wasn’t perceived as such was an aesthetic that elevated this phenomenon of daily life from insignificant to consequential, compounding the fabric of our life. Finally, Gilda de Mello e Souza pointed out ‘it is an aesthetic that is not concerned with being a work of art – much less a masterpiece – it reveals magical qualities, one of the most valid and highest forms of knowledge’ (Souza 1980, p. 34). Without a single doubt, a time of dilemmas confronts a new generation of people who are desperately poor, jobless, unhealthy, refugees of climate catastrophes, war and inter-ethnic conflict. To show no interest in these topics is to shy away from our responsibilities. Design must also be considered in this context, which

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implies that research cannot continue to be dominantly Eurocentric. Research that raises profound critiques of knowledge production itself is clearly required. In the Brazilian framework closing the gap of knowledge is not a one-way process based on the indigenous traditions and late modern knowledge: it is actually a process of exchange and mutual learning. Obviously this requires the production of knowledge outside the framework of colonialism. This includes listening to the various research agendas proposed by graduate students. These scholars are committed, deeply immersed in the cultural and the social needs of their physical milieu. Likewise, they are able to exercise judgement, interpretation skills and design knowledge, and address gaps in their own contextual understanding. All of this is evident in, and beyond, the work of collectors and their organisation in Minas Gerais and São Paulo, on the homeless, among other voices and hearts. In the spirit of Edward Said (1997, p. 162), their interpretations are ‘situational’, they ‘depend very much on who the interpreter is, who he or she is addressing, what his or her purpose is in interpreting, and at what historical moment the interpretation takes place.’

References Barbosa, L. 2009, Design Without Borders: The Relationship Between Nomadism and Sustainability (Design sem fronteiras: a relação entre o nomadismo e a sustentabilidade), PhD thesis, School of Architecture and Urbanism, University of São Paulo, Brazil. de Gusmão Pereira, G. 2004, On Designing and Surviving on the Streets: An Inventory of Inventions, Master’s thesis, School of Architecture and Urbanism, University of São Paulo, Brazil. de Souza Martins, J. 2008, ‘A casa imaginária de Dona Fulana’, Semanário da Arquidiocese de São Paulo, São Paulo, Year 52, No. 2684, 12 February, p. 2. Gonçalves-Dias, S. 2009, Collectors: A Perspective of Their Inclusion in the Recycling Industry Field, PhD thesis, School of Architecture and Urbanism, University of São Paulo, Brazil. Said, E. 1997, How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World, Vintage Books, New York. Souza, G. 1980, Exercícios de leitura, Duas Cidades, São Paulo. Wanderley, I. 2013, The Design of the ‘Others’: Creative Interactions in Contemporary Artifact Production, PhD thesis, School of Architecture and Urbanism, University of São Paulo, Brazil.

9 LOOKING FROM THE OTHER SIDE OF THE STREET Youth, participation and the arts in the edgelands of urban Manchester Janet Batsleer and Jenny Hughes

You have to keep your head down and learn to live like a ghost.

Manchester (UK plc, as it might now be known) was the world’s first industrial city. Referring to the city’s rapid industrialisation in the first half of the nineteenth century, historian Asa Briggs (1958) memorably described Manchester as ‘the shock city of the age’. A bearer of the characteristic values of modernity; ‘liberty, equality and Bentham’ the city became associated with the oft-repeated motto, ‘What Manchester does today, the world does tomorrow’. Attributed by some to Benjamin Disraeli, nineteenth-century British Prime Minister, the motto has since been reinvented as a strap-line to the regeneration of Manchester as a global brand, printed on t-shirts and badges bought by both visitors and natives to the city. A city in which Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels began to map out the Communist Manifesto and Friedrich Engels wrote The Condition of the Working Class in England, Manchester has become associated with its football clubs cum global brands, with the players attached to these clubs now recognised the world over. In the post-Thatcher period, Manchester became a corporate venture, with the city council creating partnerships with private capital to support regeneration through business, sport and the creative industries, and urban global redesigns of sport, cultural engagement and leisure have played a key role here. As if to signal civic pride in the regeneration of the city, around the roundabouts of the inner ring road the words ‘This is Manchester’ are displayed, in case those driving by mistake their location for anywhere else in the world. This chapter offers an account of an arts and social welfare project in central Manchester which dwells dissensually inside the increasingly corporate, privatised and branded space of the city. The Men’s Room started life as The Blue Room in 2004, working primarily through drama, theatre, photography and youth work

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with young men engaged in sex work in Manchester’s Gay Village. As The Blue Room evolved, the project engaged visiting artists and social care workers, as well as a small core team of artists and support staff, who undertook arts and drama workshops, outreach work, group work and drop-in sessions. The project was a response to issues facing vulnerable young men which Graeme Urlwin, one of the project’s founders, had first become aware of through his work with Albert Kennedy Trust, an agency named after a young man who fell to his death in 1987 from the roof of Chorlton Street car park in the Gay Village. Albert had run away from a local care home and the site of his death quickly lent credibility to the view that he had become involved in ‘renting’ or selling sex. After a few years of life, the Blue Room expanded: increasing numbers of young men who neither engaged in sex work nor identified themselves as sex workers were engaging in the project and this led to a partner project, the Wednesday Men’s Drama Group, in 2008. Participants on both sides of the project share experiences of being looked after by the State, alcohol and drug use, mental health problems, educational failure and involvement in crime. Generally speaking, the men live outside of normative social and familial frameworks and are often not in secure accommodation. The aim is to engage young men who are not accessing support services in the city and are unlikely to do so. In this regard, the primary nomenclature and self-identification of the Men’s Room is as a creative arts project. The artistic identity of the project is important: young men can take part in creative or social activity without being asked to ‘perform’ problems or seek ‘fixing’ interventions. They choose the extent of their involvement in creative and social activities: they are not asked questions about their lifestyles and do not undergo any formal assessment. Social support is there if requested but the primary aim is to engage individuals as creative and complex persons rather than as in deficit or need. As part of this, the artistry of the project shapes a diverse cultural infrastructure of support: the Men’s Room has worked with a wide range of artists and in collaboration with an ever-increasing network of cultural organisations in the city, including major theatres, live comedy venues, independent cinemas, universities and museums. The Men’s Room engages with young men who frequent areas historically and contemporaneously associated with the growth and decline of Manchester as an industrial city, and that now offer spectacles of urban regeneration, entrepreneurialism, consumption, hedonism and celebration, as well as poverty and exclusion: Piccadilly Gardens and the Gay Village. Some gravitate there because they are homeless or in temporary accommodation in areas of the city that may not feel like home: these areas of the city centre provide a sense of belonging. Interestingly, many of the participants not involved in sex work frequent the Gay Village, perhaps attracted by the permissiveness associated with the area and the possibility of blending in without having to look or act a certain way. The 20-year period since Albert Kennedy’s death has seen the transformation of the space occupied by the gay community in the life of the city. Civil society organisations contribute to the ‘cultural offer’ of the City through Pride, the festival which occurs annually in August celebrating lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities, as well as

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contributing to the inclusion of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender perspectives in the development of public services. This transformation has been accompanied by the emergence of the ‘good citizen gay’ who evidences an ‘inclusive’ civic culture above all by participation in the market place. Echoing Henry Giroux’s anxiety that the social spaces of the present materialise modes of ‘public pedagogy’ which produce limited identities and categorisations of self that uncritically serve a neoliberal economic agenda, here ‘difference has become marketable, a feature of consumption’ (Giroux 2005, p. 4). It is said that one boy who contacted Lesbian and Gay Youth Manchester after coming out at school complained of being under pressure in the following terms: ‘Everyone wants me to go shopping with them.’ Sexual citizenship has been conferred through money (with gay weddings another opportunity to spend it) and through the appearance and practice of pro-social responsibility. This positions the ‘good gays’ against the ‘bad queers’ on ‘the other side of the street’. As explored below, while Gay Pride Manchester received tourism awards, the young men using the Blue Room felt themselves, in their own words, to be regarded as ‘scum’ and ‘shit’. The Men’s Room project is deliberately designed to occupy a space on the borders and edges of the corporate city working with young people whose lives are rendered outcast and marginalised by the political and economic processes that produce those spaces. In the account of the project offered here, we draw on Jacques Rancière’s (2010) term ‘dissensus’, and his distinction between ‘police/ politics’, to describe the unsettling ways social space is symbolised and ‘practised’ by the Men’s Room, and draw attention to the way in which this critical art project offers a choreography of social care that mirrors, rather than transforms, the social worlds of its participants. The design of the ‘interventions’ made by the project is crucial to understanding its significance: this design includes a commitment to maintaining a transient presence in a range of formal and informal spaces in the city; to valuing the men as creative and resilient agents rather than as units of deficit, risk or need; to non-intervention where appropriate; and to creating arts events that intervene dissensually in public spaces. As such, the aim of this chapter is to present a theorisation of the project’s design that recognises the interdisciplinary and multi-faceted character of its evolution as well as the background of the co-authors (we come from the worlds of youth work and socially engaged arts respectively). The chapter is stimulated by a concern to contribute to the diversification of modes of thinking about and doing youth work and socially engaged arts practice. Here, these modes of thinking and doing are challenged by a long-term intention to work with young men experiencing high levels of risk and exclusion – all the time conceptualising these young men as creative and political subjects engaged in worldmaking endeavours. In the account that follows, we describe four ‘interventions’ made by the project that exemplify the affective, democratic and participatory learning processes it stimulates, that is, its characteristics as a ‘border pedagogy’, to draw again on Henry Giroux, that works to unsettle the commodification of city space and open up possible ways of being and doing otherwise in these spaces. We provide an account of four moments of unsettlement of the

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symbolic order of space in the city centre: an arts exhibition in the Gay Village; a conference for educators and social welfare professionals; a performance of a play in a publicly funded theatre; and a series of walking tours. In this, we ask: How can an art and social welfare project be designed in order to support a critical aesthetic and political project? To what extent does operating in an edgeland risk subjecting those who occupy these spaces to further marginalisation or exploitation?1

The edgelands of informal care and learning ‘Edgelands’ are the ignored and neglected, yet familiar, areas of land that cannot be securely described as city or countryside and which offer a kind of wilderness inside and at the edges of cities. These areas constitute ‘an incomprehensible swathe we pass through without regarding; untranslated landscape’ (Farley and Roberts 2012, p. 5). In their poetic description of the edgelands of Lancashire, Paul Farley and Michael Roberts imply that edgelands counter the homogeneity of the high street and cultivated spaces of the city and countryside. Their account chimes with the Men’s Room’s challenge to discourses and practices of social welfare, and the ways in which the latter work in harmony with the development of good citizen-consumers in the normative spaces of the city. On encountering an urban wasteland, Paul Farley and Michael Roberts comment that ‘the city, suddenly, has a new scale, an underness and overness, and the eye, having scarcely a moment to readjust from the enclosing streets and buildings, is overwhelmed’ (Farley and Roberts 2012, p. 137). Importantly, they stress that edgelands, including wastelands, are always on the move, offering a diverse ecosystem and an untapped resource for wanderers, and are far from the bleak environments depicted in television dramas and by psycho-geographers. How does the Men’s Room exhibit the characteristics of edgelands? To some extent, the project exhibits an edgelands mentality, moving round various sites in the city centre as part of shifting partnerships and networks that support its survival, and also in order to better engage with the young men by reflecting their transitional occupation of space. This occupation of sites generates resilience and helps to sustain the project, but it also means that the project at once occupies and eludes or blurs the gaze of police, welfare agencies, and other networks of authority. The four moments from the project explored below, exhibit some of the ways this edgeland ethos and practice reveals the city in a ‘new scale’ with ‘an underness and overness’ that overwhelms the eye. As such, the shifting occupation and eluding of the gaze consistently reverses, inverts, or subverts. As with a distorting mirror at a fair, these gazes are made to go awry in encounters with the project. In turn, new perspectives on social welfare and youth work are generated, and alternative modes of care and learning are projected both on the imagination as well as in material space and time. As noted above, the project maintains a consistent but transient presence in informal and formal spaces in the city ranging from occupation of a youth services agency to spaces not conventionally associated with youth work. Traversing sites of marginalisation, exclusion and normative cultural space, the Men’s Room is

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characterised by an improvised use of space, with the project dwelling in a number of sites over the years. These spaces of informal care and learning include a small barber’s shop in the Gay Village, a car park, a large tent in the street, the walls of derelict buildings (used to project animations), a large former warehouse used by the King’s Church (an African Pentecostalist Church), the green room of a major theatre, a University drama department, a live comedy venue as well as a youth services agency. Because these are usually not institutional spaces, or at least they do not ‘belong’ to the staff of the project and their residence in them is impermanent, they are, paradoxically, spaces where the young men can partially identify and find a sense of belonging. Everyone involved is ‘in’ but not ‘of’ the space and is only there temporarily, this facilitates an equality and a mutual recognition which flies in the face of the assumptions embedded in ‘outreach’ (from ‘us’ who are included to ‘you’ who are not). In the barber’s shop, the site of the weekly drop-in, there is no reception desk and the only obvious position for a worker/client relationship was the barber’s chairs which we were asked not to use. There have been discussions about a permanent venue but, to date, staff have preferred not to establish the project in a securely identified ‘place’, instead favouring temporary residence in ‘space’ within the city-centre beat of the young men that has a day-time purpose distinct from this evening-time use.2 This uncertain residence in space reflects the shifting patterns of participant engagement with the project: relationships with young men have often lasted for many years, but can be configured by fits and starts, appearances and disappearances, moments of achievement followed by moments of crisis. The improvisation evident in the project’s use of space is reflected in its approach to participation and engagement. Here, staff exhibit openness to change plans at a moment’s notice and an ability to translate disruption into creative contributions. They do not regularly undertake assessments and they work in partnership with a range of agencies. This adds up to maintaining a presence and offering unconditional forms of inclusion rather than an enforcement of support. There is an explicit contrast to mainstream youth work, therefore, where participation has been commodified to the extent that ‘out of school’ projects can be said to ‘welcome selective inhabitants of the margin in order to better exclude the margin’. In such practices ‘identity’ is provoked and binaries created through a series of discourses which readily polarise: ●

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A discourse of the ‘youth divide’: those who are ‘at risk’ as against those who are ‘on track’. A discourse of good versus bad young people: young volunteers as against rioting, feral youth. A discourse of the body and sex: early sexual relationships against delayed pregnancy/marriage. A discourse of growing autonomy and agency: already adult status against children and young people who need to be protected or who are in need of intervention.

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A discourse of scales of expectation and what counts as cultural capital: five GCSEs grade A–C as against informal, non-institutional modes of personal development, citizenship and community.

Once such binaries are in place, it is possible for the work of a project like the Men’s Room to be constructed as (and indeed, there is a risk that it becomes) a ‘police’ project, with the discourse and practice of the project focusing on dysfunctional families, sexual abuse and managing risk, in ways which remove the participants in the project from any sense of agency. Paradoxically, inviting young people to speak, in the context of these prevailing languages can intensify marginality. Above all, what seems hard to challenge and make visible is the very system of classification and legitimation at work in some practices of youth voice: quasi-governmental committee processes as against direct action; representation as against collective action. As it is, through these classification structures that afford and deny access to symbolic capital, a form of symbolic violence is performed against all those, such as members of the Men’s Room, who do not access approved forms of participation. This suggests that claims about the access through youth work and other youth participation initiatives to forms of cultural capital should be treated with some ambivalence. Yet, insofar as they do open up and construct spaces for voice outside the teaching machine, it is possible to think of youth work and informal education as a border pedagogy, a place of skirmishes as well as bridge-building in a system where symbolic violence is practised consistently through the communication codes of ‘youth’ against those on the other side of the classification (Giroux 2005). But this still leaves a problem to address: participation can be said to work for those already positioned in the mainstream but not for those whose lives are lived on the edge. Even in the very moment that participation projects engage with people at the edge, by accepting the positionings on offer as ‘engaging the disaffected’, ‘reaching the hard to reach and chaotic’, they work for the already mainstream. Rather than continuing to invoke secure forms of identity and processes of identification, the Men’s Room offers a border pedagogy that unsettles the mainstream. We draw on the term ‘police’ above very deliberately, taking this from Jacques Rancière. Some recourse to his distinctions between police/politics will be helpful for untangling this ambiguous and problematic terrain. In his exploration of the limits of democracy, Jacques Rancière offers two dimensions of thinking about the organisation and symbolisation of the social realm: the police and the political. He states that a separation is performed by the categorisation of ‘people’ or ‘demos’, which introduces a disjoint between the population and the people it represents (think ‘at risk’, ‘excluded’ as well as any other term that attempts to account for a group), creating ‘a surplus in relation to every count of the parts of society’ (Rancière 2010, p. 33). For Rancière, politics emerges in this disjoint: ‘Politics exists … in the form of a supplement to every count of the parts of society, a specific figure of the count of the uncounted or of the part of those without part’ (Rancière 2010, p. 35). The phrase ‘the part of those without part’ is key to

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understanding the political; here, politics becomes present within and is a process of making present, that which is surplus, voided or excepted from any system of order or classification. This surplus is immanent in every sphere of social life (not simply in the zones of the marginal or excluded, but also across the ‘mainstream’). As Jacques Rancière goes on to explain, conflict arises from opposition between ‘parties’, people, objects and places that have a proper use, function, identity, and the surplus or void of every classificatory system, the ‘part of those without part’. Here, the ‘police’ does not refer to the police force in the everyday sense, but to the consensual symbolic order created by and protective of this classification and determined to exclude any sensibility or sense of the surplus. As such, the slogan of the police is: ‘Move along! There’s nothing to see here!’ and politics exists ‘in re-figuring space, that is in what is to be done, to be seen and to be named in it. It is the instituting of a dispute over the distribution of the sensible’ (Rancière 2010, p. 37). Jacques Rancière’s idea of ‘dissensus’ describes a working against the consensual symbolic order: the essence of politics consists in disturbing this arrangement by supplementing it with a part of those without part, identified with the whole of community … Politics, before all else, is an intervention in the visible and the sayable … The essence of politics is the manifestation of dissensus as the presence of two worlds in one. (Rancière 2010, p. 36–37, italics in original) The partition of the sensible performed by the police divides, separates and excludes in the same moment of providing moments of legislated or permitted participation and places from which to speak: dissensus reveals the breaks in the sensible created by this move and critical art projects reside in the new sensibilities of the common that emerge. As a result of this, for Jacques Rancière, critical art ‘is an art that questions its own limits and powers, that refuses to anticipate its own effects’ (Rancière 2010, p. 149). In its double move of occupying and traversing informal and formal spaces, and the discourses and practices of youth work and social welfare, the Men’s Room, at best, presences the unsettling, edgy surplus already resident in those cites/sites. With Jacques Rancière, Men’s Room staff do not make claims for the efficacy of this dissensual practice, there are no claims of transformed lives (in fact, staff explicitly question ‘myths of linear progress’ when reflecting on individual participants’ engagement with the project). There is also a sense in which the project participates in the symbolic order identified as ‘police’ by Jacques Rancière in working with agencies to offer support, access to welfare and housing, to monitor and report to the police any new kinds of risk facing young men who are selling sex. However, as will become evident below, there is a consistent effort to unsettle implicit to the creative and artistic impulse of the project. The project dances, in carefully choreographed ways, the line between police and politics. Here, new modes of informal care and learning are indicted in ghostly ways, as edgelands are

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uncannily present inside the normative, finding the cracks that bring into being the presence of other worlds and evoking the movement of unseen, non-normative, irregular, unfixed, outcast experiences within the realms of the declared, normative, regulated, fixed and included. This has ripple effects across the networks of partners and participants of the Men’s Room, helping to maintain a diverse social and cultural infrastructure of care in the city. This resonates with Anne-Marie Willis’s account of ‘ontological design’, where an object (and we might see the project as an object of sorts) is a thing that ‘things’ (she draws on Martin Heidegger here), it gathers, unites and shares a number of presences in one space and as such it is an active worldmaking (Willis 2006, p. 88). The project gathers together presences that are concealed under the shiny surfaces of the regenerated city, with no agenda to put these to use, but rather to be attentive to, via artistry and creativity, what accrues through their gathering. In the same way, as Heidegger suggests, ‘the bridge gathers the earth as landscape around the stream’ (Willis 2006, p. 90), the project gathers young men, artists, social care workers, social and cultural institutions, in a range of informal and formal spaces, to presence a different way of thinking about informal care and learning in youth work and social welfare. It gathers presences together without definition, and sees what imaginings emerge. Without stalling exclusion or securely sculpting inclusion, artists create points of encounter, extend worlds of relationship, express compassion and posit the possibility of a novel practice of youth work and social welfare inside the cycles of waste and emergency of late capitalist society. As part of this, the project resists the future and conditional orientations of welfare interventions, instead favouring the ‘here and how’ presence of a creative process. By deliberately materialising a border space between institutional space and informal spaces (‘edgelands’), it introduces regular unsettlements of the rhetoric of transformation that supports polarised identities. What becomes present, what is presented, are new kinds of transformation, not of the young men, but in how we attend to and imagine our city, its possibilities, its profound inequities, its histories and its futures.

Looking from the other side of the street When the young men who arrived at The Funky Crop Shop, the barber’s shop, to take out cameras and make beautiful photographs of the streets and gutters, secret places and gardens, litterbins and reflections, the work which became ‘Looking from the Other Side of the Street’ in 2008 was still being designed. Over several evenings people sat in the barber’s shop and wrote poems and made drawings which would become the basis of silkscreen prints while others went out into the streets with the cameras. The images created included depictions of love hearts and the desire for love, the contents of litter bins with the word ‘SHIT’ beautifully designed above, the shimmering, direct and touching images offering a counterpart to the corporate Manchester brand characterised by ‘cool’ and accompanied by a flatness of affect.

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The works were curated and displayed professionally by colleagues from The Lowry theatre and gallery. The negotiations with National Car Parks (NCP) about the use of the metal grids, which form the outside of their car park, were productive. This is where the project started, in a tent, and the tent was erected again every night for a week to host the exhibition. The young men and Blue Room staff were there as exhibition guides. These edgelands are also heartlands where the eye and heart are overwhelmed momentarily. The corporate space of the NCP Car Park looks across at a pub called Paddy’s Goose: iconic scenes of past times in the Gay Village become a temporary dwelling for the exhibition. For some the NCP Car Park on Chorlton Street is corporate, for others it is as iconic as the pub, signalling sexual freedom and hedonism. Both spaces, inside and outside, hold the social memory of gay men’s life in the city and the current realities of the sex trade too. Looking at the work in the exhibition, in these spaces, invokes the looking at which precedes purchase by punters. The border pedagogy, with the camera as tool, creates a change of perspective. Looking and enquiring are dissensually happening in places where police views are more usually aimed at consumption, either sexually or in terms of numbers of free condoms distributed by health outreach workers promoting protection from HIV and other sexually transmitted infections. In The Funky Crop Shop, a few doors down on Bloom Street, there is a more friendly space out of which the photographs and images are being created. There is a lot of chatter and some food. Some young men appear for the week and then are not seen again until the exhibition. Another comes week in, week out to dictate the poems as he cannot write. One week the car with food provided by the Church of God of Prophesy arrives a day early and we all eat a wonderful threecourse meal. In these temporary dwellings that the project and others present in the homeless community create, care is present and the normative gaze is unsettled. These are more equal relationships than the characteristic relationship between services and clients and the role of ‘professionals’ is put into question. A form of post-emotionalism and flatness of affect characterises the ‘marketing of difference’ which global capitalism has embraced. Excitement and amazement, fear and disgust, mark places where this flatness is challenged and so the edges and boundaries (the separating of the sensible) which these emotions point to as they emerge, are also places of enquiry. Pleasure can be taken in the naming of unpleasure. During this project there was intense discussion of the helpfulness of identities, chosen or ascribed, particularly of the term ‘sex worker’. All the participants were negotiating the shame associated with displaying their work in public, and the associated shame of being publicly available for rent. When the exhibition went up, one of the silkscreens, the one covered in love hearts, was very much in demand by a visitor to the exhibition. It might be imagined that here was a punter offering to buy not a sex act but a silkscreen depiction of a heartfelt cry for love and the answer to the question ‘Is it for sale?’ and ‘How much?’ was an ambivalent one. Such a dynamic raised clearly the issue of taking responsibility in the new construction and redirection of boundaries in the emerging democratic space of the

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street. Naming is a form of ‘partition of the sensible’ and yet it may also enable a breaking of silence, which involves an acknowledgement of the void, of the pain that is written out even whilst it is being created in the corporate world. Here, people more usually looked at by CCTV cameras were themselves doing the looking and enquiring into the life of the city. Public performance, exhibition and compassionate witnessing changed the design of the street and changed, momentarily, the meanings of corporate space, making present the need for a wider transformation. From such edgelands it became possible to see momentarily emergence of new kinds of inbetween spaces and unsettlements. This happened, at least in part, through an encounter with the pain of expulsion and social abjection, so that participant K’s photograph of a litterbin with the word ‘SHIT’ at the centre of it formed a central focus of the exhibition. ‘People look on us like dirt.’ ‘People shouldn’t look on us like dirt.’ The use of the language of ‘scum’, ‘shit’, ‘dirt’ and ‘rats’ makes present a process of social abjection which positions participants in a place almost outside and yet not quite totally excluded. It points to the void which ‘police’ accounts strenuously exclude. The display in a curated photography exhibition on the outer fence of a car park, the making beautiful of the SHIT in rubbish bins and in the gutters of the streets of the Gay Village unsettles this singular construction of the city for all who pass through the exhibition and makes translation possible in relation to the emergence of a different world. During one of the Blue Room performances, Iranian demonstrators for democracy were marching with the slogan: ‘We are not dust and dirt’; there was a sense of emergence of a different world signalled by the dust and dirt rising, in Blue Room performances, as well as on the streets of Iran.

The ‘Down not Out’ conference The ‘Down not Out’ conference in June 2009 was the culmination of a three-year period of working in partnership with the Manchester Homelessness and Dual Diagnosis Teams and was a creativity-led event for professionals and service users from across the city. The conference posed the question of how the young men are usually seen by service providers, highlighting the following statement by the City Council at the time: Due to a frequently chaotic lifestyle … the majority of clients have substance abuse problems and engage in begging to support this … as a result they have difficulty sustaining commitments, keeping appointments, lack of confidence in services, difficulties in accessing services due to a history of anti-social behaviour or offending. (‘Down not Out’ conference, 2009)

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This is how clients are usually seen and the power to define their lives, to ask questions and create fixes to problems lies with the professional; no-one talks about ‘hard to reach’ services, only ‘hard to reach’ clients. The conference was facilitated by the Blue Room as an arts and performance event and, during the preparation and performance of this event, the staff worked with project participants as well as participants from other street homeless communities in the city, including the Big Life Drama Group and the Booth Centre. The processes of classification which afford and deny access to symbolic capital and which enact symbolic violence were the focus for the event. Over and over again the performances of participants returned people from their roles as ‘clients’ or ‘service providers’ to a sense of common ground, of shared humanity. One play presented the relationship between a grandfather and his grandson (who had become involved with drugs and the street homeless community) as a counterpoint to scenes of bullying and violence. Another play enabled mental health professionals to give voice to their unease about how they sometimes saw clients being treated. Towards the end of the day the clients took to the stage as the experts and the audience of professionals asked them questions. The unsettling processes of critical pedagogy required a turning of the tables, a renegotiation of settled patterns of relating. The unlikely space of the King’s Church enabled that to happen. The King’s Church is a large building on several floors, once a warehouse, which houses an enormous Pentecostal church. The ‘Down not Out’ event took over one floor of the building for two days of rehearsal and one day of the event. This space was an edgeland for everyone taking part as for liberal professionals the spaces of African Pentecostalism are ‘other’ and for the young men and other performers this was a formal space that they had not visited before as clients or service users. Using methods of critical enquiry and dialogue the event created a borderspace where there is often mutual suspicion and incomprehension. One of the methods used to do this was to generate from Blue Room members a series of questions they would like to ask of professionals. The activity of questioning and assessing of course most usually flows in the other direction, in order to define and classify clients and apportion resources, so this turning of the tables was an unsettling critical act. The questions young men had for the professionals were: ● ● ● ● ●

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How much do you get paid? Why do you do your job? Why is it so difficult to get help sometimes? Why don’t workers try to change things more? Why do I have to stay in a hostel, a negative environment with drink and drugs, in order to get to the bottom of the housing ladder? Why are you wasting my time?

In answering these questions the fact that many of those working with the young men who they encountered in services had personal connections with the

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experience of homelessness, addiction and mental health difficulties in their own families became visible, as did the relatively low pay of many people working in services, especially at the front-line. Forum-theatre style performances enabled some answers and further conversation to emerge in the in-between space of the client–professional boundary. These non-approved questions brought the exchange and performance to life. As they took to the stage, the performers challenged and made visible the classification system which awards the right to ask questions and set agendas to one section of society (the experts) and calls on the others (the clients) to form focus groups. Each group, ‘clients’ and ‘service providers’, were able to live temporarily on the common ground of the King’s Church as performers and artists. This ‘border skirmish’ was redirected, temporarily, into a politics arising from the common ground of performance and away from the routinised clashes and divisions that exist between clients, professionals and researchers.

Piccadilly rises in the Royal Exchange Theatre Piccadilly Gardens … Beautiful on the face of it All done up ... By day kids in nappies jumping in the fountain To a soundtrack of drums from all over the world … But by nightfall what was buried underneath wakes up But by nightfall it’s all chuggers, sherms and getting a chew off a dirt. Them same drummers getting ragged by the TAU That fountain … Watch out for that fountain cos at night it becomes a whirlpool IT pulls you in Before you know it you’re grazing for butts for your bens . . . Watch out for offers to bill you a zute You get sick with the ride Cos it won’t just be your face that some geezer thinks is cute. Spinning and pulling you into its tide Once you’re in it You’re caught in its spin Its chaos is magnetic It’s a powerful force that won’t let you leave. (Wallwein 2012, pp. 11–12) This extract is taken from Thirsty, written by playwright Louise Wallwein and Men’s Room participants, and performed by four professional actors as part of a ‘Northern Soul’ event at the Royal Exchange Theatre early in 2012. During the play the audience witness a scam conceived by ‘Poodle’, the character speaking here. Poodle steals Kev’s wallet and then befriends him, taking him to Piccadilly Gardens, an open space in the centre of the city, to drink vodka, and Poodle and another character, Norman, try to discover the PIN for the cash-card in Kev’s

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wallet. Here, we also meet ‘Monster’, a dog with his head stuck in a wall who figures as part of Norman’s reality, and ‘Pete the Pigeon’, who is on an ASBO from Trafalgar Square and ‘exiled to this provincial outpost’.3 These latter characters are dramatic devices used to explore the internal dialogues of Poodle and Norman: at one point, Poodle says to Pete the Pigeon, ‘if I can crack the PIN I can sort my rent out at the hostel, I can pay the lekky, buy some scran.’ Similarly, Monster’s interventions show the rising pressures on Norman: ‘you’d better suss him quick or Poodle’s just going to get him drunk and drag him to the cash point, beat him up.’ In the speech above, Poodle introduces Kev to the hidden world of Piccadilly Gardens at the heart of the city, a regular haunt of Men’s Room participants and not more than half a mile away from the audience. As Poodle’s speech gathers pace it becomes inflected with the dirt, threat and chaos of the Gardens at night: a world of disorder, imminent violence and police surveillance. The play ends with Poodle sitting on the ground, knees to his chest and hood up – an anonymous, pathetic and uncannily familiar figure that closes the audience’s temporary access to the complexity and fragility of the characters’ survival in a world within worlds. To refer back to Jacques Rancière’s notion of dissensus noted above, importantly, the conjuring of a world within worlds in Thirsty happened without identifying the young men who collaborated in the writing of the play. The piece was performed by professional actors, not the participants themselves, and this strategy is typical of the careful symbolic practices of the Men’s Room. It was also a response to the necessity of planning for the possible non-attendance of the young men at the performance. As Ben Turner, community projects coordinator at the Royal Exchange, comments: ‘there might be no group, so we needed a way of the Men’s Room being represented that didn’t mean they had to perform … also, if there is a group, it might be quite a challenge for us as a building’. The intention was to extend an invitation to a group that would not normally frequent the theatre, while at the same time not require them to ‘perform’ within the normative expectations of a community project. Importantly, this strategy of nonidentification included the fact that sex work was not depicted in the play, other than through Poodle’s comment above that ‘it won’t just be your face that some geezer thinks is cute’. In fact, the production week at the Royal Exchange was well attended, with the young men turning up early to attend rehearsals, mix with professional actors in the theatre’s green room and rehearse their own piece, Fish is England, which was performed prior to Thirsty. This piece combined the serious with the ridiculous, keeping the audience enjoyably off-kilter and parodying the discourses of authenticity that figure in much participatory arts work. As part of the piece, Men’s Room members, staff and participants alike, played a queer chorus of fish in a pet shop, wearing baggy overalls and long stripy socks, commenting on the audience, their own lives and the problems of Pete Street, the protagonist of the play. At the end of the play, Pete is in crisis; he comes to the front of the stage, covers his face with his hands and the audience hears a voiceover of his hopes for the future. The fish then parody this: ‘in five years’ time I want to be married to a nice Cod’; ‘in

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five years’ time I want to be living in a sea of passion’; ‘in five years’ time I want to be in the wild’. Here, as in Thirsty, participants did not ‘perform’ their experiences for an audience of others. The chorus of fish offered a parodic doubling of the worlds of the participants present, and this embedded a protective aesthetic into the performance. Importantly, this also happened as part of the framing of the event. The programme did not identify which was the community performance and which was the ‘professional’, a decision that communicated a sense of value for both pieces and that fits well with the Royal Exchange’s commitment to placing community engagement at the core of its activities. The theatre has made changes to its spatial practices in order to facilitate this; for example, removing protective barriers from the foyer space and sharing the resources of the theatre with an increasingly diverse range of community groups. Echoing the outcomes of the two ‘interventions’ above, the ‘transformations’ materialised here are spatial and relational; the project challenged the exclusive aesthetic hierarchies of a cultural institution, and this was as important as providing an opportunity for creative development for participants.

By way of conclusion: the paradoxes of street pedagogy A city is a community of strangers sharing a common space, and for many participants of the Men’s Room, there are few spaces you can go and be with people who are like you. A project like this therefore creates a sense of freedom for cultural educators who work at edges and peripheries to challenge and develop democratic practices; to engage with participants who do not operate in the so-called normative realm in a way that mirrors and unsettles (rather than promises to intervene or transform) lives and worlds: what is revealed as precarious is the system of classification which orders spaces as well as the lives this system includes and excludes. Working creatively through arts practices is essential as these practices work to: ● ●

● ● ● ● ● ●

Enable as well as disrupt symbolisation. Allow provisionality, so that imagined and improvised identities and relationships can emerge. Give permission to play and therefore to imagine. Encourage ways of being with others. Encourage trying things out with temporary and unconditional commitment. Welcome the surreal. Welcome failure. Work against the flatness of affect against, through its recognition, ‘left melancholia’.

We have also identified youth work as a pedagogy involved in border skirmishes with the symbolic violence which is practised consistently against those at the bottom of the classification ladder. Arguably, by traversing sites of marginalisation, exclusion and normative cultural space, the ‘design project’ underpinning the

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Men’s Room illuminates the ‘state of exception’ covered up by the appearance of norm and order in liberal democracies (Agamben 2005). The choreographies of care exhibited by the Men’s Room highlight the interdependence of normativity and failure, crisis and emergency that lies beneath the sheen of a regenerated, post-industrial city. It celebrates the creativity of the young men that it encounters, and at the same time reveals the structural inequities, spatial, social and economic, that shape their lives. And by staging such creative and political interventions at the margins, the project has also, arguably, staged a cultural reclamation of urban space. As such, it exists within but also is resistant to the postmodern milieu of the ‘metapolis’ (Ascher 1995). Is it reasonable to refuse to participate with ‘outsiders’ in a debate about urban design and aesthetics, about the regulation of ‘aggressive begging’ and ‘rough sleeping’, for example? Given the need to attend to the excluded in order to discover new modes of being and doing in cities (in the light of ongoing issues relating to sustainability, democracy and social care for example), how can we enable radical forms of democracy and participation? The ‘Down not Out’ conference began to prefigure ways of doing this via a reversal of roles and in its use of space, and this also happened as part of the design of the dissensual interventions described above. Most recently, a participatory research project undertaken by the young men and one of the authors has reversed and extended the mode of outreach practised by the project in order to help the men respond to the questions: ‘How have you survived in the city? What spaces have been important in your survival?’ Outreach activities of the Men’s Room include ‘walking the beat’, a twice-weekly tour of areas in the Gay Village frequented by young men selling sex, focusing on the reduction of harm, including dispensing condoms and lubricant and passing on safety advice, as well as offering friendly, supportive encounters. It includes regular walks through the village, Piccadilly Gardens and surrounding area, and occasional meetings outside of sessions. Here, the practice of walking in the spaces of the city centre frequented by the men invites accidental encounters that might lead to valuable moments of practical, social and emotional support. In remapping street spaces by walking, Men’s Room staff mirror the unofficial maps of non-attachment and unbelonging, choreographed by the men, combining regular appearances with a lack of fixed abode in a way that effectively extends the project’s choreography of care. The research project, in the style of the Situationists, ‘detourned’ this practice of walking. Here, we invited young men to lead the researcher and an artist on a walking tour of city centre sites that they associated with their survival, to take photographs, and if they wanted, to describe the site.4 These walks revealed the city in a new scale, including neglected nooks and crannies of the city, and gave small, nondescript sites a sense of extraordinary significance. It also extended the supportive street pedagogy of the project by offering opportunities for compassionate witnessing. The walks provided an insight into the emotional valences of everyday city spaces. We were taken to multi-storey car parks, the roofs of buildings, park benches, underneath railway arches, support centres for the homeless, canal towpaths, canal

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bridges, patches of grass, alleyways, lampposts, and a spot next to a wall. These walks into edgelands generated a new attentiveness to the city culminating in a startling body of images and testimony that we hope will lead to a creative outcome as well as a research report. We heard stories of radical sociality amongst those living on the street, as well as exploitation and threat. We heard stories of hope, desire, escape and adventure, but also terrible isolation and violence. We heard about intense, uncontainable feelings, too large for the present, being spoken out loud to statues or screamed from the tops of multi-story car parks. We were pleased to discover that it was impossible to go hungry in Manchester, and to hear about the compassion of members of the police and security guards policing corporate spaces but we also heard about abuses of power. We learnt how to use alcohol to sleep, and what to do when you need to eat, piss, shit, shower when living on the streets. We heard about punters who don’t pay up and we learnt how to lure, intimidate and humiliate gay men who are seeking to pay for sexual encounters. We learnt how to survive by collecting special offer vouchers from city centre bars, how to identify the bakeries in the city centre that were good for shoplifting, what to do when you need an address, and about the importance of free internet provision at the library. We learnt that being homeless can feel like getting a break to sort your head out and that isolation was sometimes a welcome relief as it meant staying out of trouble. The walking tours, which invented a symbolic order for the city that was small-scale at the same time as omnipresent and pulsating with significance like Heidegger’s bridge, brought the city into being by gathering and sharing presences that were rarely seen or heard in this way. The experience of walking, keeping moving, not settling in one site for long seemed important, as did placing the young men in charge of the symbolic constitution of the experience. Reflecting the police/politics ambiguity of the Men’s Room, we were moved to tears but also felt like voyeurs, slum tourists, local authorities, and unwelcome, alien visitors in a city we did not recognise. We learnt that the small, nondescript spaces of the city, a pile of bricks, the corner of the third storey of a car park, a spot of grass, a wasteland just off the high street, can be experienced as more secure and supportive than the unpredictable and provisional social domain spaces, and are familiar, reliable, unchanging, provide somewhere to hide, to invent yourself, to see and hear, to secrete knowledge. But there is always a risk of being moved on from these sites. Spaces are things that promise a temporary solidity but are not homes to settle in permanently, as the arrival of the police, the security guard, the social worker, and an instruction to move on as there is nothing to see here, are ever-imminent.

Notes 1 This chapter arises from participatory observation with the Men’s Room from 2004 to 2013, and draws on previous work published by each author (Batsleer 2011; Hughes 2013). Thanks are due to Men’s Room staff and participants for welcoming us to the project and facilitating our research. 2 For critical debates about ‘place’ and ‘space’ see de Certeau (1984, pp. 117–118).

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3 Anti-social behavioural order: a civil order made against a person who has committed an act of anti-social behaviour, designed to restrict their behaviour in some way. Trafalgar Square is in London, a site known historically for its population of pigeons. 4 This research project was conceived and carried out by Jenny Hughes and Ali Roy from the Psycho-Social Research Unit at the University of Central Lancashire.

References Agamben, G. 2005, State of Exception, trans. K. Attell, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. Ascher, F. 1995, Métapolis ou l’avenir des villes, Editions Odile Jacob, Paris. Batsleer, J. 2011, ‘Voices from an edge. Unsettling the practices of youth voice and participation: arts-based practice in the Blue Room, Manchester’, Pedagogy, Culture and Society, vol. 19, no. 3, pp. 419–434. Briggs, A. 1958, ‘The chimney of the world’, New Statesman, 22 March. de Certeau, M. 1984, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. S. Rendall, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. ‘Down not Out’ conference, 2009, Manchester, www.mroom.co.uk/history/past-projects/ down-not-out. Farley, P. and Roberts, M. S. 2012, Edgelands: Journeys into England’s True Wilderness, Vintage, London. Giroux, H. 2005, Border Crossing: Cultural Workers and the Politics of Education, 2nd edn, Routledge, London. Hughes, J. 2013, ‘Queer choreographies of care: A guided tour of an arts and social welfare initiative in Manchester’, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, vol. 18, no. 2, pp. 144–154. Rancière, J. 2010, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, ed. and trans. by S. Corcoran, Continuum, London. Wallwein, L. 2012, Thirsty, unpublished playscript kindly provided by the playwright and the Men’s Room. Willis, A.-M. 2006, ‘Ontological designing: laying the ground’, Design Philosophy Papers issue 2, www.desphilosophy.com/dpp/home.html (accessed 20 August 2013).

10 AN EXCHANGE Questions from Tony Fry and Eleni Kalantidou and answers from Walter Mignolo Tony Fry and Eleni Kalantidou

1. Border thinking and border epistemology assert the imperative of ‘thinking the other’. Does this ‘taking a position’ presume an existence, or possibility, of ‘betweenness’ as the locus of (both) the one and the other? Not exactly; it is not a matter of ‘thinking the other’ but rather, the ‘other thinking’. I, and I am not alone so I would say we, are the ‘other’. And when the other thinks there is no longer the other, the necessary condition for the existence of the other is that the other doesn’t think. If we keep that geography and geopolitics of reasoning we keep ‘border thinking’ within imperial epistemology; border thinking is domesticated by leftist and progressive modern, Eurocentred thinking. To put it more specifically: Caliban’s reason (as I read Paget Henry introducing Caribbean philosophy) is border thinking. Prospero cannot understand that because, for Prospero, there is no reasoning in Caliban. Therefore, this is not the question of making Prospero more aware and less blind. No. It is delinking from Prospero and embracing Caliban’s experience. So that border thinking and border epistemology presupposes to know the reason of the master and the reason of the slave while the master only knows the reason of the master. By definition, the slave has no reason. You could object, pointing out that I am not Caribbean of African descent and, therefore, I do not carry in my body the memories and traces of slavery. My answer would be that the colonial wound is spread and felt all over the world, and by migrants in Western Europe and the United States of America, for example. To start with, I am Italo-Argentine; that is of European descent. That is, a ThirdWorld person for my adult experience (counting from the moment one enters at the University) has been moulded in that context. Being of European descent is not being European. And you feel it; someone makes you feel it; sociogenesis in

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Fanon’s terms. You do not know exactly what is going on at a certain stage of your life. But you know that there is something there. Then you go to France, and once again, that feeling remerges, but stronger: you feel you do not belong; you know that in the eyes of Europeans you are a Sudaka (there is a restaurant in Berlin with that name, and the card of the restaurant announces with pride ‘we are sudakas’; this is border thinking in everyday life, ‘we are the other because we know that you make us other’), and when you go to the USA, even if you have white skin, blonde hair and blue eyes, you are a Hispanic or Latino, depending with whom you are talking. Border epistemology emerges from that experience, from the experience of the anthropos (I am the anthropos) that do not want to belong to the humanitas, the barbarian sector of human beings that by feeling superior and controlling knowledge invented the other, the anthropos, the undesirable. So, that border epistemology emerges when we, the anthropos, think. The ‘in-between’ is a concept of modern and postmodern epistemology not of border epistemology. In-between makes sense if you see it, you observe it, you see it as an entity to be observed and described. We, the anthropos, we dwell in borders with full awareness of the power differential ‘between’ the two sides of the border, the side of the humanitas and the side of the anthropos. Border epistemology emerges from the experience, and the anger, of entanglement, border dwelling in power differential. Briefly, border thinking requires a shift in the geography of reasoning, a geopolitical conception of knowing, understanding and believing, a delinking from the assumption of modern and postmodern epistemology, hermeneutics and sensibility. 2. I think you will agree that colonialism, like capitalism itself, cannot be contained in a specific historical moment but exists in a condition of continual reinvention. So said, how do you view the current moment, and within it the current picture of inclusions and exclusions? Agreed, capitalism and colonialism cannot be contained in a specific historical moment. But to answer your question, I need first to set up the parameters of my own response. ‘Capitalism’ in liberal and Marxist discourses has specific meanings; in Max Weber and Vladimir Lenin (beginning of the twentieth century) respectively. Weber liked it but Lenin did not and attempted to supersede it with ‘communism’, as we all know. The lesson of the Bandung Conference in 1955 was neither capitalism nor communism but decolonisation. Another word appeared in the conversation that did not have immediate currency. That word was ‘de-Westernisation’, which has reappeared in different guises recently. The point for the time being was that both words pointed in a different direction; neither capitalism nor communism. That is, two forms of colonialism with a common source: the European Enlightenment. So, the lesson that the Enlightenment provided was the source of both, the dreams of emancipation for some and the horror of colonialism (liberal and socialist) from the left. Modern colonialism (that is, not Roman colonialism) originated in the

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sixteenth century, with the emergence of the Atlantic commercial circuit and the displacement of the Mediterranean as the centre of the North of Africa, the South of Europe and the West of Asia. Thus, by modern colonialism I understand the specific moments and forms that emerged with the conquest of people, appropriation of land, exploitation of labour and slave trade. What could that have been? I do not think that at that moment it was a clear idea of what the words meant beyond the need of people to manage their own governance and not be told what to do by people in Moscow, London, Paris or Washington: to delink from both imperial projects in contention, Western capitalism and Soviet communism. Crucially, feelings that tell all of us that we can choose between the two if we want, but we do not have to; they are not the only two games in town. The concept of ‘coloniality’ was introduced in 1989–1990. It is a concept that originated in South America, from the debates of the 1970s on dependency and theology of liberation, and from the contributions of the Peruvian radical thinker José Carlos Mariátegui. It is more specifically a concept that emerged in the Third World at the end of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Coloniality is not synonymous with colonialism: coloniality names the underlying logic of all modern imperial colonialism, from Spain and Portugal, to Holland and France, to England to the USA. For us (decolonial thinkers of the project modernity/coloniality),1 the difference between them is irrelevant, as it is also for decolonial critiques in the Afro-Caribbean and continental Americas (from Mapuches in Chile to First Nations in Canada). The logic of coloniality underlies and guides all Western states (theological–monarchic and secular states), imperial and global designs. The differences between them are really family feuds. Coloniality is short-hand for ‘colonial matrix of power’ and colonial matrix of power means and names a structure of governance and control (of governance, of the economy, of knowledge and subjectivity, of gender, sexuality and ethnicity, of belief and spirituality, of sensibility) that was put in place in the process of building the Atlantic commercial circuits and the theo-political control of bodies through churches, monasteries, universities and implantation of European urban spaces that displaces the urban space of existing civilisations (e.g. Mayas, Incas, Aztecs, Iroquois, Mapuches, etc.). So that which liberals and Marxists call ‘capitalism’ for us is one specific domain of the colonial matrix of power, the domain of the economy. Therefore, economically coloniality brought about a new type of economy unknown until the sixteenth century. That type of economy is characterised by the re-investment of surplus value provided by the massive appropriation and expropriation of land, the massive exploitation of labour in order to produce commodities for a global market. This type of economy goes hand in hand with the emergence of a subject and subjectivity that sacrifices human lives (e.g. slaves and slave trade) to warrant economic growth and economic benefit for a small group of (in)humans. It follows that inequality, inclusion and exclusion are inscribed in the very logic of coloniality. Logic here means that coloniality is an ‘engine’ to generate un-justice

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in the name of modernity. And the logic of coloniality has been steered by Christian theology (theo-politics to manage and control souls) first and by liberal politics (and all its manifestations from the narrative of democracy that replaced Christian Paradise, to bio-politics that replaced theo-politics, from working to live to living to work) and economics later (free market, invisible hand, economic progress and success displacing Christian ethics). Both Christian theology and liberal politics and economics generated their own critics within Europe (socialism, Spinoza, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, etc.) and its importation/exportation outside Europe. For example, the Russian Revolution, Lacan in Argentina, Theology of Liberation in South America, etc. are different manifestations of the logic of coloniality, that is, the good, the bad and the ugly according to European ideologies, ways of life, preferences, etc. Another illustrative example – the Cuban Revolution – was the consequence of the leftist side of coloniality; very different from the Iranian Revolution, a revolution that was not inspired by Marxism or any other postmodern or Christian theology of liberation but by Islamism. Islamism is neither from the right nor from the left according to European standards. I am not saying that the Iranian Revolution is preferable to the Cuban Revolution, neither is the French Revolution preferable to the Haitian Revolution. I am saying that the Haitian and the Iranian Revolutions do not share the same grounds and the same sensibilities as the French and the Russian Revolutions inspired by European Marxism. So that at some point the European critic of European coloniality becomes part of the logic of coloniality, when this critic travels outside of Europe and becomes (for different and complicated reasons and by different actors, European and non-European) the ‘universal’ critic and alternative to ‘universal’ European coloniality. This is when the decolonial comes into the picture. The Bandung Conference left a legacy: neither capitalism, nor communism, but decolonisation. And of course, the participants in the Bandung Conference were not only people of colour, as Sukarno made explicit in his opening speech, but were people of non-Christian persuasion.2 Bottom line, the colonial matrix is a European design first for Christianisation of the globe, after that the Civilisation of the world (e.g. civilising mission), and more recently by developing and democratising by means of democratic and developmental designs, implemented by the nation-state as a model of governance and development as the model of economic growth. By 2000, Western imperial-states (e.g. the USA and the European Union) began to lose control of the colonial matrix of power that they had created. The control and management of coloniality is being disputed by ‘emerging’ economies gaining political confidence. With the recent Vladimir Putin move (with the quiet support of China and BRICS states) to still the leadership of the USA, European Union and allies, it is a clear case of what has been in the making for about a decade: de-Westernisation. De-Westernisation is the emerging design to confront the last attempt of the West to homogenise the planet: neoliberalism, the last stage of the West (the European Union and the USA) controlling the colonial matrix of power.

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3. Contemporary re-readings of Carl Schmitt’s thinking on ‘the Nomos of the Earth’ suggest a major disruption of spatiality and sovereignty resulting in a transformation of how the geopolitical and geo-cultural world is viewed. In this context it seems as if new power blocs are in formation (e.g. the BRICS nations), confirming Schmitt’s notion of Grossraum, but the old rhetoric of a world order remains as a voice on the world stage. Against this background, how does this contradiction look from a Latin American perspective, especially because (as Schmitt pointed out) a first move in the USA assent to a global power was via the Monroe Doctrine’s claim of all the Americas being its sphere of influence? I would say first that it is not for me ‘how the geo-political and geo-cultural world is viewed’ but, on the contrary, ‘how the world is viewed geo-culturally and geopolitically’. The world is not geo-political and geo-cultural in and of itself. It is the work of the colonial matrix of power, global linear thinking as Schmitt has it, that divided the world geo-politically and geo-culturally according to the interest of Europe first and the USA later (e.g. the invention of the Middle East, invented by the Anglophile Alfred Thayer Mahan [1840–1914] to USA interests). Second, I wonder if you mean the contradiction of the old rhetoric with the emerging political and economic multi-polar world order? If this is the contradiction you have in mind, the explanations that I can offer based on the modernity/ coloniality/decoloniality framework (which did not originate in Europe or in the USA but in the Andean regions of South America and expanded to the Caribbean, Central America, USA, and now we find it in South Africa, Russia, East Asia), is that ‘contradiction’ is a Marxist conceptualisation of capitalism. For us modernity/ coloniality is not a contradiction, but the very ‘nature’ of modernity. Coloniality is not the contradiction of modernity. It is its darker side. Modernity is half of the story; coloniality is the other hidden half. In my recent book, The Darker Side of Western Modernity, Global Futures, Decolonial Options (2011), I devote a chapter to Schmitt’s three possible global scenarios after the end of the Second World War. One of them in fact was rendered by means of the concept of Grossraum. It is common today among political and economic analysts to talk about the multi-polar world in which we are living and which will be, no doubt, increasingly multi-polar in the twenty-first century. On the partition of the Americas by means of the Monroe Doctrine I have also devoted some time and ink in the past and returned to it recently.3 So, I can respond to your question in two complementary lines. The Monroe Doctrine and its corollary, the idea of the Western Hemisphere, took place at the crucial moment of the transformation of the colonial matrix of power (remember, Schmitt is concerned with global linear thinking and international law organising the partition of the world to European interest. I am interested in the making and transformation of the colonial matrix of power, which was not visible to Schmitt). That crucial moment of transformation took place in the Americas (the USA and

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the Haitian Revolutions, and the independent nascent republics in South and Central America). The Monroe Doctrine and Western Hemisphere asserted that America is for Americans, not for Europeans. That means, for the United States of America. So the Monroe Doctrine established a line between Europe and the USA and another line between Central and South America and the USA. By this second line, the Monroe Doctrine replicated the division between the North of Europe (France, Germany, England) and the South (Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece). Thus coloniality, or the colonial matrix of power, was reorganised in the process of changing hands from the South to the North of Europe and from the North of Europe to the North of America. What Schmitt couldn’t see was that the multi-polar world that he anticipated would be conformed by colonial and imperial differences between several poles or centres. Multi-polarity implies convergence, but convergence in conflict precisely because of the long history of Western domination. We are witnessing clear changes to the end of Western domination, not of course of Western Civilisation. Vladimir Putin’s move in Syria calling for a Pacific Solution after Barack Obama declared his intention to invade the country is a clear example that the control of the colonial matrix of power (or coloniality) is under dispute. China and Russia blocking the invasion of Syria in the UN Security Council is another. Dilma Rousseff’s recent cancellation of her announced visit to Washington because of Brazil being spied upon, and one of the most spied upon countries is another. Rousseff requested from Obama a written explanation of USA behaviour. And later on, she cancelled the visit until the explanation is extended in writing. It was considered ‘natural’ that Obama cancelled his visit to Russia because of Edward Snowden’s case. But it was not expected that a President from the ‘South’ would cancel a visit to the ‘North’. 4. Latin America has given us a number of unique models that depict the multifaceted character of colonisation. In particular, the contemporary nation-state of Argentina is a by-product of different colonial phases: financial colonisation (bankruptcy), decolonisation (local financial discourse disconnected from the USA) and postcolonisation (resurface of USA debt). Based on this example could a country ever be decolonised under the domination of the ‘new empires’ (international monetary bodies)? Good point. This is a question that often comes up in talks, seminars and conversations with colleagues and graduate students. My quick answer, and then I explain, is ‘no’. Under present conditions ‘a country’, that is a nation-state, cannot decolonise. What nation-states are doing, just taking the case of ‘Latin America’ (I explain later the quotation marks), is to de-Westernise. What does it mean? It means that the economic coloniality (e.g. capitalism, in liberal and Marxist vocabularies) is being kept, but the rhetoric and the doing manifest a clear delinking from the USA and the European Union, that is, today in the process of re-Westernisation (e.g. to

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regain world leadership). Some examples: if you listen to President Evo Morales at the UN in the past few years, you will see what I mean.4 If you listen to Evo Morales responding to the European Union about his ‘kidnapping’ you will understand what I mean. Recently Dilma Rousseff cancelled her visit to Washington DC, until the written request from President Barack Obama responding to his spying on Brazil, is received. What Bolivia is doing is building an indigenous middle class for which before that, only Creole and Mestizo/as had access to middle-class income and privileges. The same is happening in South Africa. There are problems of course, but a sector of the Black population, like a sector of the indigenous population in Bolivia, is acquiring middle-class status. And of course, you cannot say that only white or German or USA or white Australian have the right to enjoy middle-class privileges. That is what de-Westernisation means and that is why ‘countries’ as long as they are a ‘nation-state’ can hardly engage in decolonisation, simply because the global economic system won’t allow it. The bottom line here is the China model, preceded by Singapore. You see, ‘Latin America’ was supposed to modernise and develop by the time Singapore was taking off and then China, since 1978. Why did ‘Latin American’ countries not modernise and develop? Because they were obedient to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the Inter-American banks. Under such conditions, any economic agreement meant roughly 70 per cent of surplus for foreign companies and 30 per cent for ‘the country’. What Brazil, Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina, Venezuela did was to invert the proportions. That is why they were considered from the ‘left’. But left and right are no longer meaningful. De-Westernisation is ‘left’ because of its confrontation with the leaders of the European Union and the USA, and it is ‘right’ because it is capitalist. Enter Snowden and Syria and you will understand how Russia became, with China, a powerful player in the processes of de-Westernisation, a point of non-return. Enter Hassam Rohani’s letter to Barack Obama and discourse at the UN and you will understand what de-Westernisation means. Going back to ‘Latin America’, Chile, Colombia and Mexico (and Peru perhaps) are lined up with ‘re-Westernisation’, that is, the attempt to maintain Western global leadership under adverse global conditions. And finally, decoloniality cannot be enacted, at this point, by any small state, and it would be hard for big states, like China. The best they can do is to deWesternise, that is, to delink from USA instructions of what to do. And they are doing it, and President Barack Obama knows it. Decoloniality in the twenty-first century is, and continues to be, a task of the global political society. The global political society is not the state and is not the civil society either. What we see now is the politicisation of the civil society (‘Intifadas’ in North Africa, ‘Los indignados’ in Spain, Greece, Portugal, England), ‘Occupy’ (USA and other parts of the world where the movement disperses) and the crucial and relentless task of the Zapatistas (lately their building of Los Caracoles and La Escuelita). In South America, neither Pueblos Originarios nor people of African descent live in ‘Latin’ America. Latin America is not a subcontinent but the political project of creoles of Iberian descent that built and managed the state after expelling the Spanish and Portuguese

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from this land. Indigenous people live in Abya-Yala, since the Second Summit of Indigenous People of the Americas. And continental people of Afro descent live in La Gran Comarca. That is to say, Abya-Yala and La Gran Comarca are names of a political project, parallel and in conflict with the name of Latin America that is the imaginary space where ‘white Latin Americans’ live. Certainly, Latin America is the name in the sphere of international relations, economic transactions, media and area type studies in the USA or Europe (now disguised under Hemispheric Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Studies of the Americas) and the like. 5. The digitalisation of everyday life has turned certain organisations into virtual post-national global powers and the more one looks at these organisations, and their associates, the more one discovers just how deeply enmeshed they are in bringing everyone globally who is in any way electronically ‘connected’ within a regime of surveillance and data harvesting. We view this as a form of mutant neo-colonialism, what’s your comment on the subject matter? Yes, indeed. What you call neo-colonialism, is for us (within the modernity/coloniality research paradigm and political and ethical project).5 Neo-colonialism is an expression within the modern conception of linear time. And that is fine within modern/postmodern talks. We do not use it because we are looking for mutations of the colonial matrix of power. Digitalisation was not of course invented to promote decolonisation. It was invented at the crossroads of creativity and invention related to business and then used all over, in the humanities and in the arts, for example, which brings humanities and the arts into the realm of coloniality, even if artists and humanists have good intentions. By this I mean that once you subject yourself to digitalisation you are caught in a double-bind: you are of course encouraged and enthusiastic about the possibilities that digitalisation allows, and at the same time you fall into the project of those who created digitalisation. I do not have for digitalisation an example equivalent to what the Zapatistas did with the Internet to help the Zapatista uprising, but the Zapatistas used the latest technological gadget to their own advantage. Now, there are three questions here, independent of when, why, and for what digitalisation came about. Look not just at what digitalisation does for us but how is it promoted. In the promotion of digitalisation you will quickly identify all the tropes of the rhetoric of modernity: progress, advance, development, improvement, facilitation. You will not see a sign, in the discourse about digitalisation, of coloniality, what are the consequences of digitalisation. You know, after Norbert Wiener published his ground-breaking Cybernetics: or Control and Communication In the Animal and the Machine (1948) he published a small book titled The Human Use of Human Beings (published in 1950 and revised in 1954). In the same way he was celebrated for his revolutionary ideas in the first book, he was ironically cast out by his own colleagues after the publication of the second. The most common argument was that Wiener was a magnificent thinker but in the second book has gone the wrong way.

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The dark side of digitalisation has been widely discussed and affects precisely the points you are underlining: connection and surveillance on the one hand and on the other users’ ‘voluntary slavery’. These are two huge problems. The third one is what is needed to maintain the tremendous ‘advance’ of digitalisation: this is one example of how the rhetoric of modernity hides the logic of coloniality. To maintain the global technological industry you need certain ‘natural resources’, like Coltan which creates enormous problems in Africa: from conflicts and wars to health issues, poisoning of the population living in areas where mining is being carried on.6 In Argentina (and other Andean regions) the struggles against the damage caused by open-pit mining (extractions of minerals to keep the productivity of techno-products) are widespread. But you do not hear much about this in the promotion of digitalisation and where the mineral to digitalise comes from and at what cost.7 Here you have a splendid example of what we mean when we talk about the rhetoric of modernity (salvation, progress, development, modernisation) hiding the logic of coloniality. So the question is not only to point out that open-pit mining, for example, is corporative neocolonialism with the support of states in emerging economies. What is more important for us is to understand this set of phenomena in the wider spectrum of how the colonial matrix of power works. Bottom line for us is just the mutation of the content of coloniality. The logic is the same that was put in place in the sixteenth century. The materiality of culture and communication was mainly the book and the printing press. Later on, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the telegraph, the telephone, photography, the moving image, etc., up to Wiener’s ground-breaking ideas, cybernetics, the art of command and control: cybernetics (n.) coined 1948 by U.S. mathematician Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) from Greek kybernetes ‘steersman’ (metaphorically ‘guide, governor’) + -ics; perhaps based on 1830s French cybernétique ‘the art of governing’.8 Bottom line: 1

2 3

Digitalisation brought significant changes which separate human beings more and more from the world (replaced by ‘representations’) and from each other. Increasing technological connectedness increased the dismantling of personto-person communication. Look around when you walk in the city or airports: everyone and his or her aunt is being ‘connected’. They are totally oblivious of what is going on around them. It facilitates the human use and human control of human beings, as Wiener predicted. And, most devastating, it demands the exploitation of natural resources in the ‘non-developed world’. The non-developed world is a source of natural

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resources, exploitation of labour and consumers of a technology whose materiality is devastating their own societies (e.g. Coltan, open-pit mining). And now a question for you: Do you think that digitalisation can help in ‘deepening’ our understanding of the colonial matrix of power and help to ‘liberate’ us from surveyance and from indiscriminate destruction of life, of nature-human? Can digitalisation help us to decolonise digitalisation? 6. We concur that learning demands unlearning – but would you equally agree that making now (by design) equally implies unmaking (again by design)? I think both shall be interrelated for learning to unlearn is crucial to guide us in re-learning and to be/do otherwise. Otherwise is equivalent to decolonial thinking and doing. And decolonial thinking and doing is part of our understanding of the colonial matrix of power. This is the specific way we, in the collective, understand decoloniality. Granted, there are many other uses of the term, and we do not claim to have the right one. When I wrote Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledge and Border Thinking (2000), the main thesis was that local histories are all there is. There cannot be global histories, except in the mind of someone anchored in a local history that for some anxiety reasons needs to tell a global history. Not the global history, but one global history. One of these anxious people was G. W. F. Hegel. Let me say in passing that my book was a ‘secret’ dialogue with Hegel’s Lessons in the Philosophy of History (1822, 1831). But for reasons I explain in the preface to the second print (2012), I did not want the reader to engage in G. W. F. Hegel and not to pay attention to the argument I was making. ‘Designs’ in the title of my book mean ‘imperial designs’. It means that the colonial matrix of power became, in the complex process of putting it in place, the global designs of Western Civilisation. This design, as we analyse it today, was not set up in an office, with computers. Most of it was unconscious, but it was the unconsciousness of people living in the same cosmological consciousness: Christian Theology in its Western version after the Crusades. The theological model was adapted to the secular, ego-logical model, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and became hegemonic in the nineteenth. My sense of ‘design’ at that point came from previous research when I was writing The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality and Colonization (1995, 2003). I was not yet, at that time, into the concept and conceptualisation of the colonial matrix. However, I was looking at the conquest and colonisation not as the brute force of soldiers and adventurers or of eager missionary saints hunting for souls to convert to Christianity, but as something that was common to soldiers, adventurers and missionaries. At that time what they had in common couldn’t be other than Christian Theology. That is, these people did not grow up under Islamic or Confucian belief systems. And I look at that ‘commonality’

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through the ideology of the alphabet (alphabetic literacy), colonisation of memories by alphabetic written narratives, and colonisation of space by mapping. It was only a few years later in the process of writing Local Histories/Global Designs that I realised that the ‘common’ element I was looking for in my previous book was a ‘design’. And that design was the one that Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano identified, around 1990, as ‘the colonial matrix of power’. More and more I am convinced that the colonial matrix rules the world. It was built, transformed, managed and controlled by Western monarchic and secular states, from Spain to the USA. Now the global dispute is for the control of the colonial matrix of power, and that is what, for example BRICS countries, are doing; that dispute and affirmation explains Vladimir Putin’s appropriation of Barack Obama and John Kerry’s menace to bombing Syria and transformed it into diplomatic negotiations. That explains the ‘peaceful rise of China’. That explains the turnaround of Iran. Briefly, the colonial matrix, or the master Western global design, put in place and changing Western hands for 500 years, is no longer under control by the West. So then, learning to unlearn what the colonial matrix of power, made by human beings at the same time that human beings became prisoners and agents of their own doing, means to delink from it once we understand how it works and what it is doing to us, not for us. Design is in my view something that requires ‘learning’, and that learning could be implemented in the reproduction of the colonial matrix or it could be re-directed towards decoloniality, that is, towards learning to unlearn design in order to re-learn design for liberation rather than for reproducing the human uses of life and the regeneration of life. In other words, unlearning designs should drive us to ‘take it away’ from current corporate uses and to mobilise it towards a decolonial vision of communal life. That means of course to delink from all the psychological chains of economic coloniality (capitalism in liberal and Marxist vocabulary). When Fanon insisted on a ‘new humanity’ I think he was already understanding that ‘change’ within the same doesn’t make us feel ourselves comfortable if we delink from the overarching conception, ‘modern’ conception, of life to which digitalisation is so much contributing. But let me finish with speculation on what decolonial designs may look like. I think what I say next shall resonate in Australia. They cannot be global designs, a global design to decolonise the world. The belief in global design as abstract universal by which some person and institutions could ‘design’ the life and will of others, it is over. It is not over unanimously globally, but there is a growing awareness of coloniality’s global designs. So, they respond with decolonial designs: resurgence.9 Leanne Simpson is a writer, activist and academic of Mississauga Nishnaabeg ancestry, in Canada, with a PhD from the University of Manitoba. One major line of her argument is First Nations’ ‘resurgence’. ‘Resurgence’ is a design, not of her, of many. That is the way she articulates that design. That design is decolonial. She is a writer, and her forthcoming book of short stories, including a CD with music and poetry, is titled Island of Decolonial Love. All of that is part of the process of ‘resurgence’. Let’s quote some of her writings from an article included

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in a collection she edited. Her piece is titled ‘Our Elder Brother. The Lifeblood of Resurgence’. The book title is Lighting the Eighth Fire (2008). In pre-conquest time, we did not rely on ‘funding’ to support the cultural aspects of our lives. Grandparents were willing to teach their grandchildren their culture. Communities, clans, and families supported and took care of their Knowledge Holders … In ‘modern technologically advanced’ Western society, knowledge requires capital because Western society is exclusively literate, as opposed to oral (or aural). Knowledge production in Western society requires vast amounts of natural resources. Western society requires money to produce and distribute books. It requires computers (plastic, heavy metals, dioxins, etc.) to store and retrieve information and electricity (hydro-electric, development, nuclear waste, etc.) to run the computers. The production of high-tech knowledge equipment (computers, cell phones, fax machines, printers) requires natural resources, and at the end of their short life cycle, they become highly toxic techno-trash releasing dioxins and heavy metals, including mercury and lead, into the environment. (Simpson 2008, p. 77) When I talk about this, I hear the counter-argument: that is New Life. For us who are not First Nations it could be. But this is irrelevant. What is relevant is that for First Nations what they are doing is not New Life in the Western sense, but decolonial designs of resurgence. In short, learning to unlearn in order to relearn cannot be captured in one global design good for all. Designing to un-design abstract universals could be a decolonial enterprise when it is specifically located in a specific project of decolonisation. Decolonisation cannot be run by computer designs from some mathematical centre at Stanford or Harvard! Computer designs could be of help, but to do so they shall be at the service of decolonising visions rather than decolonisation at the service of computer designs. Decolonisation cannot originate in computer designs because computer design is a technology responding to several other designs, but not decolonial ones. And after reading the paragraphs by Simpson one wonders if computers, and computer designs, are what we want to advance decolonising goals and strategies.

A response Walter, as you will discover when you see the book, our Q&A section performs a very interesting dual function placed as it is at the end of the book. For many readers it will prompt a re-reading of some, or all of the chapters. Every contribution is in some way situated in and by your remarks, but certainly not in a uniform way. Second, the consequence of what you have had to say in response to our questions powerfully adds to the intent of the book to generate discussion. This is so because

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for us, and we are sure for others, your answers invite debate, which means the book ends with an opening rather than a closure. We share a good deal of your analysis but equally we have other, if linked, concerns. Some of these are naturally connected to our being from another situation, another place. Like the USA, Australia has been both colonised and its colonialists colonisers, but our history is more recent and it has a certain and different kind of rawness. As a geographically large nation with a small population in Asia it also lives an undercurrent of vulnerability. This creates a particular kind of dependence upon the USA and is a relation that exists with a degree of uncertainty and ambiguity. As China expands its presence in the Pacific, increasing numbers of USA Marines arrive to set up bases in North Eastern Australia. Meanwhile, China and the USA are the nation’s major trading partners, and this marks another relation of dependence. But the nation’s fate is also directly linked to Indonesia, with its huge population, high exposure to climate change impacts and food security issues. These three factors are very much a part of the geopolitics of the region. Just in the past few weeks there have been reports of Indonesia seeking to buy one million hectares of Northern Australia, an action directly linked to the three issues mentioned. We will return to Indonesia in a moment because we want to say something on Greece, for this also inflects our perceptions. Greece exposes another problematic. As Heidegger said, in a voice of unaware Eurocentrism, ‘we all think like the Greeks’, it’s a trace that ever remains that is echoed in epistemological colonialism. Yet the experience of the Greeks themselves is of an endless cycle of colonisation. The human condition itself is an individuated manifestation of an even more fundamental version of this cycle; we are born an animal who becomes colonised as a form of ‘the human’ (a plural being with other names). Obviously such colonisation is not being conflated with colonialism. But what is being intimated is perhaps a more complex geometry of relations of power than your answers imply. The slave of G. W. F. Hegel’s master and slave dialectic was not deemed to be without reason. But here we touch the semantic problem of translation as it folds into the abyss of communication. Are we talking about the same thing: reason as a specific epistemological construct, reason as a historically formed discourse, or reason as the rational mind? Other examples can be cited: certainly we do not share the same understanding of ‘betweenness’; it is not the same as ‘in-between’ but an ontology of non-binary oscillation (movement within contradiction rather than between contradictory positions). These comments again return us to the opening of a debate yet to arrive. Dealing with the plasticity of language returns us to Greece where we hear Socrates asserting the superiority of the spoken over the written, but we hear him in the company of the wisdom of others before and after him. Now back to Indonesia; in particular to Sukarno and the gap between the sentiments of the Bandung Conference as it adopted a non-aligned position between East and West and expressed a wholesale condemnation of colonialism. Besides being an extremely autocratic ruler and a rabid nationalist, Sukarno sowed the seeds of Indonesian expansionism. As addressed in this collection, this action had a

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violent expression in 1975 with the invasion of East Timor. It resulted in a 25-year war of liberation in which over one in ten Timorese died. The darker side of modernity ever doubles. Of course we do have some differences. (We believe the nation-state is much weaker than it’s presented to be, this not least as the power of mega-regions rapidly grows; over 60 per cent of all global wealth generation now comes from them. Added to this the cost of climate change: impacts are going to be beyond the means of very many nations and thus will create crisis.) While our agenda overlaps, our concern with the impact of design, as a cultural and economic force with enormous historical and futural ontologically determinate consequences, is offered up for further exposition and exchange. What we have to be clear about here is the difference between design as an applied practice and the ongoing ontological designing of the material and immaterial world brought into being by design. In this respect the ‘colonial matrix’ is an ontologically designing instrument (as some of the essays make clear). The issue of the ‘learning’ of design is not learning how to design (which is what design schools claim to do) but rather a learning of what design is and does. The meta-design imperative here is understanding designing the means of sustainment that makes our life possible. This cannot be purely an anthropocentrically configured project for ‘our life’ is implicated in life itself. Design so understood is as much a matter of elimination as creation and is framed by the ‘dialectic of sustainment’, which is simply the recognition that destruction is indivisible from creation. So again we can say our views converge (a lot) and diverge (a bit). Now to the question posed to us: Do you think that digitalisation can help in ‘deepening’ our understanding of the colonial matrix of power and help to ‘liberate’ us from surveillance and from indiscriminate destruction of life, of nature-human? Can digitalisation help us to decolonise digitalisation? The short answers are ‘no’ and ‘no’. The longer answer is much longer than what follows. We cannot actually disaggregate digitalisation from its technological substrate for it is this that is elemental to our ontological designing. From the moment hominoids first picked up a stone and used it as a tool ‘we’ were on the path to becoming technological beings (Fry 2012). The moment has now been reached and surpassed whereby technology is part of the colonial matrix. Technology was always a means employed by coloniality in all its incarnations. It has never ceased to be so. The ultimate ambition of the darker side of digitalisation is the ‘singularity project’ with its aim to download the human brain; this going beyond the limitation of the human skull and a dependence of human body. No matter how crazy this sounds, it is the forward theo-techno marker of a massive commitment to advance artificial intelligence by Google et al. Their chief engineer is the leading proponent of singularity. Importantly, as philosopher Bernard Stiegler has made very clear, cognition is being transformed and memory industrialised. The extent to which we are embedded in the immaterial matrix of the naturalised artificiality (it is a ‘nature’) is already beyond the sensible; it uses us while we use it. The unlearning that seeing depends upon rests with the recognition that the nightmare

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arrives as entertainment. As Paul Virilio pointed out and as Heidegger had before him, all communication technologies dissever; which is to say they bring things near without making them close. This is to say digitalisation cannot decolonise digitalisation because it is unable to get close to the power of the technosphere that it serves. One cannot resist and overpower nature, but one can design in and with it; but this does not promise liberation. Hence, the name of our game is sustainment. We suggest it is just not possible to speculate what ‘decolonial designs may look like’; we are not dealing with appearances any more than asking what the design of freedom might look like. Overall, we are left with a feeling of the absolute significance and value of enunciating the questions and answers of the material presented, but also of the limits of time and space that hopefully contributions to this volume will at least redress. Anyway, how could it be otherwise? Who does not impose? Who has not been colonised? Who, in sensing this lived contradiction, does not recoil? And so can unlearning, new learning and border thinking be anything other than a process?

Finally Walter, we would like to thank you for the exchange, which we think is far more than just between three individuals, for we are conduits to different fields of inquiry and action and we believe broadening the conversation is essential.

Notes 1 On behalf of. 2 Mattison, C. 2012, ‘Neither Capitalism nor Communism, but Decolonization: Interview with Walter Mignolo (Part I)’, http://criticallegalthinking.com/2012/03/21/neithercapitalism-nor-communism-but-decolonization-an-interview-with-walter-mignolo. 3 Ennis and Mignolo (2003). More recently I extended the argument in ‘Decolonial Reflections on Hemispheric Partitions: The ‘Western Hemisphere’ in the Colonial Horizon of Modernity and the Irreversible Historical Shift to the ‘Eastern Hemisphere.’ To be published in Forum for InterAmerican Research, University of Bielefeld, Germany, 2014. 4 Morales (2011). 5 Escobar (2007). 6 See, for example, ‘Blood in the mobile phone,’ www.youtube.com/watch?v=3C4w VR6oM-g. 7 www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHFI8_gNnNU. 8 cybernetics definition, unabridged from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary. reference.com/browse/cybernetics (accessed 9 October 2013). 9 This is a global trend. ‘Resurgence’ and ‘re-emergence’ are words used at different levels of the social spectrum to name decolonial and de-Westernising designs. See for example the last Sharjah Biennial 11, 2013, www.ibraaz.org/essays/59. I must also note that another global design that is countering the global imperial design of the colonial matrix of power, is being articulated as ‘Convergence’. See Mahbubani (2013). The argument is a clear example of what ‘disputing the control of the colonial matrix of power’ means. The ‘logic of one world’ is no longer here, the neo-liberal doctrine of

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homogenising the world. Neo-liberalism was the last chapter of the colonial matrix of power controlled by Western states.

References Ennis, M. and Mignolo, W. 2003, ‘Coloniality at large: The Western hemisphere in the colonial horizon of modernity’, CR: The New Centennial Review, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 19–54, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ncr/summary/v001/1.2mignolo.html. Escobar, A. 2007, ‘Worlds and knowledges otherwise: The Latin American modernity/ coloniality research program’, www.unc.edu/~aescobar/text/eng/escobar.2007.Cultural Studies.21-2-3.pdf. Fry, T. 2012, Becoming Human by Design, Berg, London. Mahbubani, K. 2013, The Great Convergence. Asia, The West and the Logic of One World, Public Affairs, New York. Morales, E. 2011, ‘On the evil ways of Imperialism in Bolivia’, speech to the UN General Assembly, 21 September 2011, www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeFwd8lDq_4. Simpson, L. 2008, Lighting the Eighth Fire: The Liberation, Resurgence, and Protection of Indigenous Nations, Arbeiter Ring, Winnipeg, MB.

INDEX

ABC TV (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) 80; Four Corners 80 accessibility: street 103 activists 134, 144, 145; hacktivist 144 Adamopoulos, John 48 Afghanistan 2 Africa 9, 55, 38; concept of 109; conflict 181; culture 109–10, 113, 114, 116, 117, 124, 126; design 109, 115, 116, 117; Kimbundu 112; M’Afrique 116, 117; South 100, 177, 179, 181; traditional building 114; see also Angola agriculture 17, 49, 139; agricultural 45, 76, 102, 109, 110, 140; subsistence farming 84 ‘Ajwa, Hussein Çelebi 71 Akkach, Samer vii, 8 Alberti, Leon Battista 62–5 Ali, Muhammad 71 al-Jabartı- 71 al-Qaida 2 al-S.afa-, Ikhwa-n 68 America: see United States of America (USA) analogical 95, 96; analogical relations 96, 97; valences 98 Andean (regions) 177, 181 Angola viii, 115, 116, 119, 120; assimilado 112; conflict 115; design 10, 112–14, 119–26; history of 110, 125; Luanda viii, 116, 119–24; war of independence 115; see also Africa animal 185; political animal 80 Animism 79; Timorese 79–80

anthropocentrically 186 anthropos 175 Ant.oun, Farah. 64 Apartheid 100; post-Apartheid 100 Apple: maps 143 Arab/Arabic: cities 67; conflict 70; design (tas.mı-m) 62–4, 67–9, 71–3; education 62–5, 67, 69, 71–3; School of Engineering 71; speaking world 9, 69; world 8, 62, 67, 69, 71, 73 architect/ure 41, 52, 53, 62–6, 69, 71–3, 85, 94, 98, 111, 134, 140; indigenous 85, 86; institutionalisation 62; modern/ ist 67, 112–13, 124 Arendt, Hannah 80 Argentina 11, 176, 178, 179, 181 Aristotle 80 art 42, 64, 65, 68, 69, 103, 116, 126; arts 68, 70, 71, 87, 180; mapping as see cartography ASBO (Anti Social Behaviour Order) 168, 172n3 Asia Development Bank 82 Asia Minor 44, 53; disaster/catastrophe 44, 45, 53 Athens 42, 49, 54 Australia 76, 78, 80, 84, 87, 98, 101, 179, 183, 185; AusAID 87 Bachelard, Gaston 141 Balkan/s 38, 42, 44, 50 Bandung Conference (1955) 174, 176, 185 Barbosa, Lara 153

190 Index

Bastide, Roger 154 Batsleer, Janet vii, 10 Beck, Ulrich 136 Bedouin 92; see also nomad Be’er Sheva 92 Beijing: Tiananmen Square 92 Being/being 1–2, 6, 7, 13, 19, 34, 57, 79, 93, 95, 97, 126, 153, 170; being in the world 124, 141; jen 21; modern 50; on the border 10; way/s of being 93, 95, 112, 124, 125, 127, 158, 169 Benjamin, Walter 49, 81 Bennett, Adrian 22, 26, 27, 35n10, 35n11 Berlin 174; conference 1885 109, 110, 129n1 Bien, Peter 40 bio-cybernetic systems 4 Bocthor, Ellious 72, 74n11 Bolivia 179 border space 163 border thinking i, vii, 2, 5, 6, 8, 13, 18, 19, 33, 34, 56, 84–6, 173–4, 187; borderlands 8, 10, 18, 20, 33, 34, 83, 85, 92; cities 107; design in the borderlands 119–24; edgelands 10, 159, 162–5, 171; living 37, 153 bourgeois 41–3, 45, 46, 49, 51, 52, 68 brain, the 186 Brazil 10, 80, 110, 151–5, 178, 179; conflict 154; design 151–5 bricolage/d 8, 44, 57n7; bricoleur 123 BRICS 176, 177, 183 Briggs, Asa 156 Britain 14, 21, 23, 28, 32; British 15, 16, 22, 28, 29, 31, 41, 51; British Empire 94; education 28; navy 28 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) 142 Brown, Barry 138 Bryan, Joel 139 Byzantine/s 38, 45, 57n2 Cacquard, Sebastien 142 Cairo University 72 Caliban 173 Campbell, John 51 Campo Santana 92 capital, human 44 capitalism 31, 40, 50, 57n6, 107, 115, 125, 145, 174–8, 183, 187n1; big 3; epistemological i; global 118, 164; neoliberal vii capitalist/s 39, 49, 50, 82, 91, 98, 123, 125–7, 163, 179

capital logic 3, 5, 82 care 52, 159–64, 170 Cartesian: dualism 138 cartography 133, 134, 137, 138, 142, 143, 146; as art 140, 141, 146; conflict 145 design 134, 139; indigenous 139–41; and resistance 132, 134, 137, 140–1, 144–5; see also Apple, counter-mapping, Google Castro-Gomez, Santiago 115 catadores 152 Catholicism 79, 80; Catholic Church 79 CCTV (Closed Circuit Television) 165; surveillance 168, 180, 181, 186; see also culture: of surveillance Centre for Immigration Studies, Washington 7 Chan, Elsie Kit Ying 28–32, 35n19 China/Chinese 8, 77, 80, 84, 116, 176, 178, 179, 183, 185; arsenals 17, 22, 23, 27; Boxer Rebellion 20; Buddhist White Lotus 19; conflict 13, 16, 18–20, 22; culture 12, 14, 24, 31; design 13, 18, 23, 24, 33–4; Du Wenxiu Rebellion 20; education 17, 23; future 12–14, 16, 19, 21, 29, 30; Fuzhou Shipyard School 27, 28, 29; Guangzhou 15, 16; Han 19; Kiangnan Arsenal 17, 22–6, 29, 34n6; Lao-Tzu 29; Manchu 14, 15, 21; Manchuria 15; Miao 19; Nanking 20, 21; Nanking, treaty of 16, 34n2; Nien Rebellion 19; Northern Sea Naval Academy 28; opium 14–16, 28, 29; Qing Dynasty 14, 15, 18, 19–23, 25, 30; relations with 12; Scientific Book Deposit 26; Shanghai Polytechnic 26; Sino-Japanese War 22, 29; Taiping Rebellion 19–21, 25, 34n4; technology 17, 21, 22, 24, 25, 27; transition 13, 31; translation 8, 13–14, 17, 18, 25–33; Wars of Humiliation 15–16; Yangtze Valley 15 Christianity 109, 182; Chinese 20; Christian 16, 26, 27, 38–40, 176, 182 city 54–5, 91, 95, 120, 141, 142, 151, 169–70; colonial 5; Global Cities 95, 98, 151; Melanesian 98; Roman 97 civil society 48, 157, 179 ‘clash of civilisations’ 2 clientelism/istic 43, 45–50 climate: adaptation 124, 125; catastrophes 154; change 88n1, 102, 124, 125, 185, 186 colonial/ism 12, 13, 28, 76, 84, 87, 99, 101, 103, 109–16, 118, 124, 128, 137,

Index

155, 173–7, 178–80, 185; anti 84, 99; city 5; colonisation 3, 5, 9, 12, 79, 109, 115, 116, 122, 125, 142, 144, 178, 182, 183, 185; coloniser/s 5, 79, 137, 185; conflict 9; epistemological 3–5, 7, 8, 21, 31, 80, 83, 185; history 70; model 7, 126; modern 93; neo 76, 81, 115, 180–1; post 2, 61, 91, 115, 137; power 5, 14–15, 112; pre 33, 103, 110, 116; recolonisation 5, 55; semicolonised 49 coloniality 10, 24, 28, 55, 84, 110, 112, 115, 118, 125, 128, 175–8, 180–3, 186; global viii colonial matrix 14; of power 128, 175–8, 180–3, 186 colonisation of the mind: see colonial/ism: epistemological, capitalism: epistemological Coltan 181, 182 commodity culture: see culture commonality 61, 182; common ground 62, 166, 167 common good: collective good 32 communism/ist 174–6; Communist Manifesto 156; Marxism/ist 125, 145, 174–8, 183; post communist 13 community 41–50, 169; design 117, 124; dispersed 4; gay 157; see also Greece, Timor-Leste compliance/conformity 82, 112; conformed 178 conflict 2, 124, 128, 178; see also Africa, Angola, Arab/Arabic, Brazil, cartography, China/Chinese, colonial/ism, Port Moresby, Timor-Leste Confucian/ism 15, 17, 18, 21, 23, 24, 28–30, 32, 33, 182; Neo 28; antimaterialism 31 consciousness 5, 38, 43, 44, 48, 182 Constantinople 38, 39, 41 constructivist 93, 97, 98 Consul General Shultz 70; Catafago 70 consumption 49, 50, 55, 105, 106, 117, 126, 157, 158, 164; conspicuous 54, 82; consumer 116, 152, 159; consumerism 113; consumerist 117, 124 counter-mapping 134, 137, 138, 141, 142, 145 craftsmen/man 63, 65; craftsmanship 68 Crampton, Jeremy 133, 140, 141, 144, 145 Crawford, Margaret 65 Crete 52, 56 crowdsourced 141 cross-cultural 62, 69, 70, 71, 104 Crusades, the 2, 182

191

culture 4, 104, 107, 136, 144, 184; alternate 127; civic 158; commodity 3, 5; cultural flatness 91; homeless 151; indigenous 9; in flux 8; material 81, 87, 151, 152, 154, 181; non-European/ Western 62, 117, 124; of surveillance 11; Western 31, 42, 124; see also Africa, China/Chinese, Dili, Greece, indigenous, Port Moresby, Timor-Leste Curitiba 92; Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) 92 cybernetics: see digitalisation dance 86, 87, 103; kuduro 120–1 da Silva Evangelista, Jorge 122, 123 decolonial/decoloniality i, 4, 7, 10, 12, 28, 56, 76, 81, 109, 123–8, 175–9, 182–4, 187; decolonial thought i deconstruction/deconstructivist 6, 98 defuture(d)/defuturing 3–5, 110, 118, 124, 125 de Gusmao-Pereira, Gabriela 152 Delacroix, Eugène 51 de La Pérouse, Jean-François 133 Deleuze, Gilles 140, 144, 145 de Medici, Lorenzo 62 de Mello e Souza, Gilda 154 democracy/democratic 43, 45–6, 48, 101, 106, 134, 158, 161, 164, 165, 169, 170, 176; illusion of 134; limits of 161; of mapping 142; narrative of 176; practices 169; Republic of Timor-Leste see Timor-Leste dependency 27, 125, 175; interdependency 123 design i, 4–9, 61–2, 91, 119, 123–5, 128, 137, 158, 165, 169, 175, 176, 182–4, 186, 187; agency of 1–2; as concealment 128; as decolonial agent 109, 126–8; designed, the 1; designers 5, 7, 62–3, 69, 73, 94, 97, 117, 118, 123, 124, 153; designing of the world 83; education 62–4, 67, 69, 72, 117; furniture 117, 152; global 183, 184; of globalisation 5, 82–3; graphic 68; handasa 68; history 6, 113; humanitarian 118–19; industrial 68, 152; interior 68, 117; khit.at. 68; landscape 68; low-cost 153; mechanical 68; muhandis 68; non 153; non-intentional 153; ontological 6, 18, 27, 32, 56, 92–5, 97, 100–2, 104–5, 107, 163, 186; .sammama 68; .san‘a 68; ‘self-centred’ 68; spontaneous 153; tadbı-r 68; tanz.-ım 68; urban 9, 53, 91, 94, 120, 170; see also Angola, Arab/Arabic

192 Index

Design for the Other 90% 117 Design Psychology viii Dhakar: Shahbagh Square 92 Dibazar, Pedram 104 digitalisation 10, 180–3, 186–7 dignity 56, 63, 153 Dili 9, 77, 81, 84, 87, 95, 98–100; culture 99; see also Timor-Leste displacement 91, 116, 120, 128, 144; see also unsettlement Disraeli, Benjamin 156 dissensus 158, 162, 168 Do it Yourself (DIY) 154 Dongtan, city of 94 ‘Down not Out’ 165–7, 170 Dragoumis, Ion 43, 44 Drucker, Johanna 133, 146n3 Du Bois, W.E.B. 32 Duke University, North Carolina viii Durrel, Lawrence 37 ecology 104; of image 6; of mind 6; social 86, 94, 126 Economist, The 100, 136 economy 38, 44, 49, 56, 105–7, 119, 126– 7, 153, 175; economic activity 136; economic knowledge 3, 46; economic modernisation 17; economic power 13, 76, 110, 113, 178, 179, 186; economics 24, 43, 45, 49, 56, 66, 80, 87, 94, 97, 104, 125, 142, 152, 158, 170, 176, 177; globalised 5, 125, 128, 136; socioeconomic 30, 32, 69; sustainable 57; see also informal: economy education 106, 107, 157; border pedagogy 158, 161, 164; in error 123; informal 161; pedagogy 64, 67, 72, 166; street pedagogy 169–70 Egypt 71, 92; Tahrir Square 92 elitist 63; skill 62, 64, 67 embodiment 93, 95, 97, 106 enframing 4 Engels, Friedrich 156 Enlightenment 27, 31, 41, 61, 68, 132, 142; Chinese 30; European 9, 65, 69, 70, 112, 174 entertainment 82, 116, 187 environment/al 13, 33, 55, 63, 67, 69, 76, 116, 120, 138, 140, 145, 159; built 65, 66, 68, 91, 92, 97, 98, 107, 135, 136; change 132; destruction/catastrophe 113, 118, 124, 126, 128, 142, 184; hermeneutical 17; injustice 142; made 1; material 151; negative 166; political

122; problems 61, 66, 67, 73; social 48; sustainable 82, 94; working 24 epistemological/epistemology 2–4, 6, 17, 19, 24, 29, 33, 93, 109, 132, 185; border 173–4; of modernity 30; postmodern 6, 174; scientific 29; violence 114, 115; Western 24; see also colonial/ism: epistemological Escobar, Arturo 56, 118, 126, 127, 144–6 Eurocentric/ism 2–6, 8, 12, 13, 26, 27, 61, 62, 82, 117, 135, 137, 155, 173, 185; knowledge 85; model 9, 84; Westerncentric 71 Europe 8, 21, 22, 40, 42, 62, 64, 69, 70, 73, 113, 135, 173, 176–8, 180; European hegemony 61; Northern 138; Western 39, 49, 50, 51 European Economic Community 50 European Union (EU) 38, 50, 55, 80, 176, 178, 179 exchange in kind/quid pro quo 54 exclusion 91, 101, 104, 107, 132, 157, 158, 159, 169, 174–6; social 50; stalling 163 famine 109 Fanon, Frantz 173, 183 Farly, Paul, 159 Federations of Indigenous and Native Peoples of the Rio Segovia Zone (FINZMOS) 139 Feng Kuei-Fen 26 fengshui 94 Fernandes, Francisco 77 festivals 103, 104, 107 First World War 29 Florida, Richard 136 food 46, 56, 102, 105, 106, 164; markets 103; security 124, 128 formal 63, 72, 107, 113, 119, 120, 123, 146, 158, 159, 162, 163, 166 Foucault, Michel 7, 39, 141, 143, 143n8; Foucauldian 143 fragmentation: of society/community 18, 43, 47, 50 France 14, 15, 40, 51, 72, 174, 175, 178; Paris Arcades 49 Franks 71 Franz, Michael 21, 20 freedom 46, 48, 55, 56, 86, 91, 92, 107, 139, 169; design of 187; corridors of 100; of the press 122; sexual 164 freeway/s 91; car-use 91; M1 De Villiers Graaff 100; Poreporena 99; traffic accidents 99

Index

French, Shaun 143, 144 Freud, Sigmund 48, 176 Fry, Tony i, vii, 8, 9, 56, 73n1, 93 Fryer, John 13, 22, 25–9, 33, 35n9 Funky Crop Shop, the 163, 164 future (the) 1, 4, 8, 11, 12, 16, 18, 56, 73, 86, 107, 109, 110, 124, 125, 128, 146, 163, 168; collective 1; designing a 9; thinking futures i; plastic 81; see also China/Chinese, Greece, Timor-Leste futuring 56, 86, 126, 127; counter 81 futural(ly) 2, 4, 7, 12, 33, 34, 82, 186 GCSEs (General Certificate of Secondary Education) 161 genealogy 95, 96; genealogical 95–8, 102, 103 Geographic Information Systems (GIS) 133 137, 141 geopolitics 1, 2, 136, 173, 185; ‘geopolitics of knowledge’ viii Germany 14, 15, 23, 178 Giddens, Anthony 54 Gillet, Coral viii, 9 Giroux, Henry 158 global 51, 54, 61, 73, 83, 84, 86, 107, 109, 117–19, 125, 128, 132, 136, 141, 175, 177, 179, 180–4, 186, 187n9; change 4; coloniality viii; corporations 76; creative industry 87; globalise/d 7, 50, 55, 91, 110, 118, 123, 124, 128, 145; globalism i, 2, 82, 83, 86–8, 132, 137, 146; globality 2; information 6; media 116; political 55; population 4; power 177, 180; South 9, 91–3, 98–100, 107; see also capitalism, city, colonial/ism, design, economy, globalisation globalisation 3–5, 8, 50, 55, 57n6, 61, 79, 91, 92, 104, 109, 113–16, 122, 124, 125, 145; violence of 2 Global Positioning System (GPS) 138, 141 Gonçalves-Dias, Sylmara 153 Google 142, 143, 186; Maps 142, 143, 144 Graham, Stephen 8 Great Exhibition, 1851 51, 52; Crystal Palace 56 Greece 185; 4th August Regime 45; Ancient 39, 40, 44; civil war 45, 49, 57n10; colonies 44; community 39, 41, 48; culture 38, 39, 41–6, 48, 53, 57; ‘Dekaokto’ 53; design 37, 39, 42, 50–7; diaspora 38, 39, 41, 42, 52; education 39, 41–3, 45, 46, 49, 56; financial collapse 55; future 55, 80; Great Idea

193

40, 44, 57n5; handmade artefacts 52; identity 39, 41–3, 48; Mount Pelion 52; New State 43, 45, 46, 51; political life 47; shame 39, 47, 48, 50; society 39, 41–50, 56; war of independence 40, 45 Griffith University i, vii, viii, 87 Grossraum 10, 135, 177 Guattari, Félix 140, 144, 145 Gulf States 67 Gusmão, Xanana 78, 81, 84, 87 Habermas, Jürgen 46 habitus 3, 82, 145 Haiti: earthquake 144; Revolution 176, 178 Halley, Edmond 133 Hall, Peter vii, 10 Haraway, Donna 136 Hardt, Michael 145 Harley, J.B. 135, 138,147n8 Hausman, Georges-Eugene 98 Hegel, G.W.F. 182, 185 Heidegger, Martin 141, 163, 171, 185, 187; Heideggerian 140 Hellenic 38, 39, 44, 52; Hellenes 37, 39, 41, 44; ‘Hellene of the World’ 50, 55; Panhellenic Union 40; Philhellenic 51; Republic 45 Henry, Paget 173 hermeneutics 6, 14, 30, 33, 48, 174; see also environment/al Hicks, David 79 HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus) 164 Hobbes, Thomas 132 homelessness 10, 151–5, 157, 164, 166, 167, 170, 171; see also culture, Manchester homogenous 103, 143; homogeneity 42, 55, 159; homogenise 176; homogenised 44, 54, 116; homogenising 117, 142, 188 Hondura 139; Miskito Villagers 139 Houllebecq, Michel 142 Howard, Ebenezer 92; ‘Garden City’ 92 Huang, Max Ko-Wu 28, 30, 31 Hughes, Jenny vii, 10 human condition 95, 104, 185 humanist 180 Huntington, Samuel 2 Huppatz, Daniel 113 Huxley, Thomas Henry 29–32 image 4, 10, 53, 54, 57, 74n11, 82, 107, 117, 127, 135; of the architect 63–6;

194 Index

fetishisation 1; of the modern 12; televisual 116, 118; see also ecology India 14, 25; Calcutta 136; Delhi 136 indigenous 38, 39, 41, 42, 46, 52, 53, 79–83, 87, 91, 92, 101, 102, 104, 111, 138, 139, 145, 146, 155, 175, 179, 180 communities 44, 47, 139; culture 43, 45, 88; knowledge 33, 54; see also architect/ure, cartography Indonesia/n 76, 78–80, 84, 85, 99, 185; Bahasa 79; forests 134; military 85; navy 99; pro-Indonesian militias 78; rule/ occupation 84, 86; timber 116; troops 78, 88n3; West Timor 76, 78, 77 informal 119, 121, 122, 151, 154, 158–63; economy 123; education 28, 161; knowledge 52, 152; settlement 3, 98, 101 infrastructure of care 163 Ingold, Tim 135, 138, 140 instrumentalism 17, 27, 32 International Force for East Timor (INTERFET) 78 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 179 ‘Intifadas’, North Africa 179 Islam/ic 2, 63, 80, 109, 182; Islamism 176; medieval history 67; Muslim 2, 20, 21, 54, 80 isolation 171 Jacobs, Jane 120 Jameson, Frederic 135–7, 142 James, Paul viii, 9 Japan 14, 15, 22, 23, 25, 28, 78, 80; Tokyo 151; Toyota 136; see also China/Chinese: Sino-Japanese war Java: 99; Javanese Traders 77 Jenkins, Keith 34n1 Jesuit/s 14, 25, 26 Jew/ish 38, 54; Zionism 92 Johannesburg 9, 95, 98, 100; Hillbrow 100; Ponte City 100; Rea Vaya BRT (Bus Rapid Transit) 100 Jones, Paul 102 Jullien, François 30 Kalantidou, Eleni i, viii, 8, 92 kandongeiros/kandongueiros 120 Kennedy, Albert 157; Albert Kennedy Trust 157 Kennedy, Thomas 22, 23, 27 Kenya 144 Kerry, John 183 King’s Church, Manchester 160, 166

kinguilas (money changers) 119–20 knowing 6, 22–4, 71, 83, 95, 174 Kolettis, Ioannis 44 Korais, Adamantios 41 Koran: see Quran Korea 15, 22, 80 kuduro: see dance and music ‘lack of fit’ 137–9 Lancashire 159 language 8, 9, 21, 37, 39, 44, 79–80, 102, 109, 110, 112, 137, 154, 161, 165, 185 Latin America 177, 178–80; see also South America Latour, Bruno 133, 146, 146n1 Laurier, Eric 138 League of Nations 53 Le Corbusier 53, 65 Lee, Dennis 137 Lee, Dorothy 48 Lefebvre, Henri 140 left, the 174, 176 Lenin, Vladimir 174 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 123, 146, 147n15, 154 LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bi-sexual, Transgender) 157, 158, 164, 171; Pride 157, 158; ‘good gays’ 158; ‘bad queers’ 158 Lifestraw® 117 Lindner, Christoph 104 livelihood 140 local, the 3, 52, 54, 83, 107, 141, 145; localise 145 Looking from the Other Side of the Street 163–5 Lord Byron 51 Lorde, Audre 146 Los Angeles 151 Loschiavo dos Santos, Maria Cecilia viii, 10, 152 ‘Los indignados’, Spain, Greece, Portugal 179 Luhmann, Niklas 6 Lusotropicalism 110; Lusotropical 111, 115 Lynch, Kevin 135, 138 Machiavelli/an 47 Mahan, Alfred Thayer 177 making 63, 68, 69, 85, 86, 96, 107, 112, 127, 177, 182; of architecture 72; of humanity 79; of the modern 18, 70; world 158, 163; of a world 6, 34 Malthus, Thomas 4

Index

Manchester 10, 156, 158, 163, 171; city council 156, 165; Gay Village 10, 157, 159, 160, 164, 165, 170; Homelessness and Dual Diagnosis Team 165; Piccadilly Gardens 157, 167, 168, 170; Royal Exchange Theatre 167–9 Manchester Metropolitan University vii Manifesto for Urban Development 9, 105–7 Mao, Zedong 13, 25, 33 marginalisation 10, 69, 70, 101, 159, 169; marginalised 37, 61, 92, 122, 127, 134, 153, 158 Mariátegui, José Carlos 175 Marx, Karl 2, 21, 34n5, 156, 176 Maugüé, Jean 154 Mbembe, Achille 55 Mediterranean 62, 175 Meissner, Miriam 104 memory 4, 52, 54, 164, 186; loss 8 Men’s Room, The 10, 156–9, 161–3, 167– 71; Big Life Drama Group 166; Blue Room, The 156–8, 164–6; Wednesday Men’s Drama Group 157 Mercator, Geradus 132; globe 132; projection 133, 135, 136, 137 metaphysics: Western 27, 29, 33 Middle East 2, 42, 177 Mignolo, Walter viii, 6, 10, 24, 112, 122, 125, 187n2, 187n3 migration 13, 54, 77, 101, 109, 111, 144; horizontal 52 Milan: Salone de Mobile, 2009 116 militarisation 111, 115 Miller, Henry 37 Mill, John Stuart 30, 31 Minas Gerais 153, 155 missionaries 14, 25, 70, 103, 182; missionary 26, 33, 118, 182 modern, the 4–6, 8, 9, 13, 17, 20, 25, 35n11, 39, 41, 49, 51, 54, 80–1, 85, 92, 93, 95, 97, 112, 113; see also making: of the modern, image: of the modern modernity i, 4, 7–9, 15–19, 24–5, 28, 30–3, 38–42, 45, 46, 48, 54–8, 61–2, 69–70, 80–3, 104, 109, 110, 112, 113, 128, 132, 145, 156, 175–7; darkside of 177, 186; failures of 56; resistance to 54; rhetoric of 180–1; transmodernity viii; Western i, 3, 24, 29; see also epistemological/epistemology Monroe Doctrine 177, 178 Morales, Evo 179 Moses, Robert 98

195

Motu-Koita 101, 102, 103; Motu Koitabu people 99 Mouzelis, Nicos 44 Muh.ammad Afandı- ‘Arif 72 muhandis khaneh 71, 72 music 86, 87, 106, 183; kuduro 120–1 mythological 85, 95, 104; myth 111, 140, 146; myth of human progress 146; myths of linear progress 162; mythology 37, 80, 96; valence 96, 98, 103 Naeff, Judith 10 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) 2 natural gas 99, 101 Needham, Joseph 8, 27–8, 35n14 negation 55, 83; conditions of 5 Negri, Antonio 145 neoliberal 31, 139, 158; neoliberalism 176 nepotism 17, 23, 47 new media 71; Facebook 81, 84; internet 81, 171, 180; USB (Universal Serial Bus) 121 newspaper teller 121, 122 Nietzsche, Friedrich 176; Nietzschean 32 nihilism 55 Noë, Alva 147n11 nomad: nomadic 6, 84, 153; nomadism 153; see also Bedouin ‘Northern Soul’ 167 Obama, Barack 178, 179, 183 obligation 47, 48, 136; cultural 83; social 43 Occidental 8, 42, 54, 112; Occident 13 Occupy 179 oil 76, 78, 80, 81, 100, 110, 132; Woodside Petroleum 81; ConocoPhilips 81 ontology 104, 185 ontological/ly 8–10, 18, 56, 79, 92–5, 97, 98, 103, 104, 105, 127, 186; change 24; formations 95; transformation 8, 33, 94; see also design: ontological ontologies 5, 84, 92; OpenStreetMap (OSM) 141, 144 Opium War 18, 34n2; Second 16, 19 oppression 19, 52, 91 orthodox/y 38, 39, 44; Greek 41, 45; professional 66 Orient 13, 38, 41, 42, 45, 51; anti-Oriental 53; de-Orientalisation 42; German Oriental Society 70; Oriental/ism 8, 26,

196 Index

53–5, 61; Orientalisation 44; Orientalist 71 Other, the 6, 10, 24, 42, 53, 83, 153, 166, 173–4; otherness 5; other thinking 173; see also Design for the Other 90% Ottoman Empire 2, 38, 39, 43, 44, 47, 50, 52, 73n2; Arab–Ottoman 62, 64, 73; customs 42; Ottoman 57n3, 71; Ottoman past 41, 53 Palazón, David 87 Papua New Guinea 9, 98; see also Port Moresby paralysis 55 parklands 105 Peckham, Robert Shannan 43 Peluso, Nancy 134 Perec, George 141 Pereira, Helder viii, 9 performative 134; objects 24; performativity 93, 97 philosophy: Caribbean 173; Western 31 Phipps, Peter 104 place 37, 83, 122, 136, 137, 144, 160; place-based 114, 122, 126 plastic 117, 151; cups 81; flowers 81; PET 153; see also future: plastic Plato 25 pluralism 7, 104; pluriversality viii poiesis 52 police 78, 158, 159, 161, 162, 164, 165, 168, 171 Pontus 53; region 44 Port Moresby 9, 95, 98–9, 100–3, 107; conflict 103; culture 101–3; design 98; Development Plan 102; Koki market 103; Poreporena-Napa Local Development Plan 102 Portugal 77, 78, 84, 87, 110–12, 175, 178, 179; Portugese 9, 78–80, 85, 99, 110–12, 114, 115, 179; Manufahi Revolt against 84; Timor 77, 78 positivist/ic 68, 133 post-colonialism: see colonial/ism poverty 3, 56, 64, 67, 76, 80, 102, 154, 157 power: see colonial/ism, Eurocentric/ism, geopolitics praxis 7, 10 Prospero 173 Prouvé Jean 113; Maison Tropicale 113, 114 public transport 105, 121; nodes 105 Putin, Vladimir 176, 178, 183

quasi-governmental 161 Quran 38 Rancière, Jacques 158, 161, 162, 168 Ramos-Horete, José 78 Rappaport, Roy 79 reason 42, 46, 114, 173, 185 refugees 7, 44, 45, 53, 78, 132, 144, 154 relational 128, 169 religion 16, 21, 37, 38, 44, 45, 54, 79, 109, 140; Western, 14 Renaissance 39, 42, 62, 69 revolution 92, 176; Cuban 176; cultural 13, 25; of independence 38; Industrial 113; Iranian 176; mechanical 52; Xinhai 22; see also Russia: Russian Revolution, Timor-Leste: revolution right, the 49, 176 Roberts, Michael 159 Rohani, Hassam 179 Roman Empire 38, 94 Roth, Robin 140 Rousseff, Dilma 178, 179 RMIT (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology) viii Rushdie, Salman 137 Ruskin, John 65 Russia 14–18, 40, 177–9; Russian 41; Russian Revolution 176 Saarinen, Thomas 135 Said, Edward 155 Salazar, Dayana 53 São Paulo 151, 155 Schmitt, Carl 135, 147n10, 177–8; see also Grossraum Schwartz, Benjamin 28, 30–2, 35n15, 35n19 science 26, 29, 31, 61, 64, 69, 72; Chinese 27; computer 133, 132; mathematical 68; and technology 17, 20; Western 14, 22, 24, 25 Second Summit of Indigenous People of the Americas 180 Second World War 49, 78, 177; post 110 self 41, 47, 54, 114, 158; pre-modern 50, 51 Self-Strengthening Movement 17, 19, 21–2, 25, 26, 28, 30, 33 Sennett, Richard 97 serious, the 168 sexual abuse 161 Sherrard, Philip 51

Index

197

sign/s 138; value 82 Simpson, Leanne 183, 184 Situationists, the 170 slave/s 173, 185; forced labour 110; trade 110, 128, 175; ‘voluntary slavery’ 181 Sloterdijk, Peter 141, 142; Rights of Man 142 ‘small is beautiful’ 4 Smith, Adam 30, 31 Smith, Dr. Eli 70 social care 158, 170; worker 10, 157, 163; youth work 156, 158–63, 169 social life 55, 92, 95, 105, 107, 126, 162; valences of 96, 97, 98 sociality 95, 171 South America 10, 175, 176, 178, 179; Theology of Liberation 175, 176; see also Latin America Soweto 100 space 5, 6, 22, 34, 52, 54, 55, 83, 84, 93, 95, 98, 116, 132, 133, 135, 138, 140–6, 151, 156–9, 160–7, 170, 175, 183, 187; ontological 8 Spence, Jonathon 26, 27 Spencer, Herbert 29, 30, 31, 32 Spinoza, Benedict (Baruch) 176 standing reserve 81, 102 Stead, Victoria 96 Stiegler, Bernard 186 subject, the 5 ‘subjugated knowledges’ 141 Sudaka 174 sustainability viii, 92–4, 124, 152, 153, 170 sustainable 82, 145; development 124–5; future 73 sustainment viii, 4, 10, 56, 186, 187; dialectic of 186; self 38 symbolic capital 161, 166 Syria 178, 179, 183; Syrian Society of Arts and Sciences (al-Jam‘iyya al-Su-riyya li-l‘Ulu-m wa-l-Funu-n) 70

televisual 13, 82, 83, 116, 127; see also design, image Teng, S.Y. 20 terra nullius: doctrine of 97 Thailand 135; Karen people 140; Thai Royal Forestry Department 140 Thessaloniki 49, 52, 54 thing/s 18, 22–4, 33, 34, 79, 82, 86, 123, 163, 171, 187 Thompson, Dr. William 70 Thrift, Nigel 143, 144 time 5, 6, 10, 52, 54, 55, 62, 84, 93, 95, 98, 123–4, 159, 180, 187; see also technological Timor-Leste 9, 76–88, 99, 100, 186; Academy of Creative Arts 87; Atauro 76; cash crop 77; Chefe Suco 85; Commission for Reconciliation 78; community 85; conflict 77–8, 84; creative industry 86, 87; culture 76, 79–82, 84–8; Democratic Republic of 76, 84; design 85–7; education 79, 80–2, 87; Flores 77; future 76, 82, 88; history 77, 80, 85; independence 78; industry 81, 82, 85; Jaco 76; Liurai 84; local craft 86, 88; local skills 85; Loromonu 99; Lorosae 99; lulik 79, 89n7; Memorandums of Understanding 87; Oecusse 76; revolution 77; Tetum 79, 80; tourism 82; uma lulik 79, 85, 86 Topasses 77, 84, 88n5 top-down governance 125 topos 6 Torres-Garcia, Joaquin 137 traditional production 56, 145; custom made 56 Tsoucalas, Constantinos 46 Tuckerman, Charles 44 Turkey 38, 39, 42, 43, 53, 71, 92; Taksim Square 93; Turkish ‘other’ 42 Turner, Ben 168

Taiwan 15, 22 techne 52, 68 technological 30, 83, 113, 124, 133, 180, 181, 186; beings 186; change 1; knowledge 25, 86; solutions 61 time 83 technology 12, 21, 25, 68, 106, 145, 184, 186; of resistance 27; technocentric 118; technosphere 187; see also science television (TV) 83, 121, 159; advertisements 50; DVD 84; as status symbol 82

uncanny/uncannily 163, 168 unemployment 49, 67, 87, 101; jobless 154; unemployed 56 United Kingdom (UK) 10, 141, 156; see also Britain United Nations (UN) 78, 82, 101, 111, 178, 179 United States of America (USA) 14–16, 23, 70, 78, 80, 111, 135, 136, 143, 173–80, 183, 185; CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) 143; dollars 119; Marines 185; military 76

198 Index

University 42 University of Adelaide vi University of California 26 University of Manchester vii University of Manitoba 183 University of Padua 39 University of São Paulo viii, 152, 154 University of Texas, Austin vii unsettlement viii, 4, 45, 53, 56, 158, 161, 163, 165; displaced 78, 115 unsustainability 3 unsustainable 3, 4, 61, 114, 124 urban rubbish excavation (catação) 152 Urlwin, Graeme 157 utopian 30, 82, 97 valences 95–8, 102, 170; see also analogical, genealogy, mythological Van Eeden, Jeanne 116 Vertesi, Janet 135 violence 24, 78, 101, 102, 144, 168, 171; sexual 111; structural 92, 115; symbolic 161, 166, 169; see also epistemological/ epistemology: violence, globalisation Virilio, Paul, 187 Von Mauren, Georg 41

Wagner, Donald 27 Wanderley, Ingrid 153 Weber, Max 174 welfare 156, 159, 162, 163 West, the 2, 7, 10, 12–14, 21, 24, 28, 41, 52–3, 70, 124, 127, 176, 183 Western: de-Westernisation 174, 176, 178, 179, 187n9; hegemony 110, 125; norms 46; re-Westernisation 178, 179; Westernisation 45, 50, 53 Weingrod, Alex 46 Wiener, Norbert 180, 181 Willis, Anne-Marie 163 Wood, Denis 137, 138, 142 world, the: of commodified desire 82; natural–social 93 World Bank, the 82, 179 worldview 5, 19; see also Confucian/ism, capitalist/s, Eurocentric/ism, Western Yan Fu 13, 25, 27, 28–33 youth voice 161 Zapatistas, the 179, 180 Zhesheng, Ouyang 31