Crime is not a moral but a legal concept. Philosophers and social scientist have viewed it from a number of perspectives – as a reflection of consensual norms, as the justification for an oppressive means of control imposed on the free individual by hypocritical social elite, or as a conceptual guide for an impersonal bureaucracy as it tries to resolve disputes and maintain law order. But it is all of those and more, you will say! And you are right, because norms are never fully consensual, social power is never entirely antagonistic, and legal procedures are never fully rational, impersonal, or free from sentiment and bias. The difficulty of setting on a universal understanding of what crime is in any given situation was one of the paths toward postmodern relativism in the late twentieth century.

However, even the most ardent postmodernist acknowledge the existence of a “thin core” of universally accepted crimes such as murder, child abuse, environmental despoliation, the exploitation of vulnerable individuals, and so on. But establishing which actions should belong to the “thin core” required an investigation of the concept that underlines crime, which is harm. This study, known as zemiology, immediately ran into a fundamental problem. The liberal Enlightenment was founded on the principle of freedom – negative freedom from overbearing authority and positive freedom to pursue one’s desires and interests. Given this general orientation, liberal thought on harm proceeds on the assumption of harmlessness. Actions must be assumed harmless until proven otherwise. Authoritarian societies tend to reverse the principle, regarding, often prematurely, any slight transgression as a threat to the delicate tissue of values, norms, and institutions on which a stable way of life depends.

The concept of harm is an ontological mess endlessly churning in the middle of those two poles. As ultra-realist criminologist Tom Raymen argues in his book The Enigma if Social Harm, the conservative idea that almost everything we say or do is harmful sits opposite the liberal decree that it’s usually harmless. Harm is conceptually deeper than crime, but not deep enough. If we dare to look underneath the zemiological mess, we can see that both totalitarianism and liberalism are both of nothing other than the fear of each other, and deeper still lie the psychological fears of extreme authority and freedom.

However, the more successful of those who risk inflicting harm on others as they commit crimes seem to have conquered and transcended these fears. Whether they are short-selling or lending irresponsibly from their positions in the financial sector, or allowing corporate industrial processes to pollute rivers, distributing drugs and organizing prostitution on poor housing estates, they seem adept at avoiding prosecution and appear at first glance as free, successful people. The art world is perhaps a rather poorly defended space that such exploitative individuals can infiltrate to commit crimes of varying zemiological magnitude – fraud, forgery, burglary, war looting, archeological looting and so on are relatively common activities while the sexual exploitation of children by abusers posing as innocent artists is not entirely unknown.

Presently it will be accepted that art is an archaic information processing system, characteristically Byzantine rather than inefficient. To emphasize this cybernetic analogy, programming the art system involves some of the same features found in human brains and in large computer systems. Its command structure is typically hierarchical. At the basic level artists are similar to programs and subroutines. They prepare new codes and analyze data in making works of art.
These activities are supervised by metaprograms which consist of instructions, descriptions, and the organizational structures of programs. Metaprograms include art movements, significant stylistic trends, and the business, promotional, and archival structures of the art world. At the highest level art contains a self-metaprogram which, on a long-term basis, reorganizes the goals of the art impulse. The self-metaprogram operates as an undetected oversee, establishing strategies on all lower levels in terms of societal needs. Because we have no comprehensive picture of human life, these needs remain rather obscure(Zeitgeist is not sufficiently teleologic to express the anticipatory monitoring function of the self-metaprogram).

…But we know that organic stability is predicated upon extensive communication networking, including memory, feedback and automatic decision-making capacities. The rudiments of such networks already exist, in the form of large-scale digital computer control systems, SAGE, the first computer-based air defense system, Project Mercury, the first real time digital support system for space flight, Telefile, the first online banking system, and SABRE, the first computerized airline reservation system are a few of many operating real time systems which gather and process data from environments, in time to effect future events within those environments…

This chapter is an effort to build an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism. Perhaps more faithful as blasphemy is faithful, than as reverent worship and identification. Blasphemy has always seemed to require taking things very seriously. I know no better stance to adopt from within the secular-religious, evangelical traditions of United States politics, including the politics of socialist feminism. Blasphemy protects one from the moral majority within, while still insisting on the need for community. Blasphemy is not apostasy. Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humour and serious play. It is also a rhetorical strategy and a political method, one I would like to see more honoured within socialist-feminism. At the centre of my ironic faith, my blasphemy, is the image of the cyborg.

A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction. The international women’s movements have constructed “women’s experience,” as well as uncovered or discovered this crucial collective object. This experience is a fiction and fact of the most crucial, political kind. Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility. The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women’s experience in the late twentieth century. This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion.

Contemporary science fiction is full of cyborgs — creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted. {150}  Modern medicine is also full of cyborgs, of couplings between organism and machine, each conceived as coded devices, in an intimacy and with a power that was not generated in the history of sexuality. Cyborg “sex” restores some of the lovely replicative baroque of ferns and invertebrates (such nice organic prophylactics against heterosexism). Cyborg replication is uncoupled from organic reproduction. Modern production seems like a dream of cyborg colonization work, a dream that makes the nightmare of Taylorism seem idyllic. And modern war is a cyborg orgy, coded by C3I, command-control-communication intelligence, an $84 billion item in 1984’s US defence budget. I am making an argument for the cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings. Michael Foucault’s biopolitics is a flaccid premonition of cyborg politics, a very open field.

The contemporary project of Design (inclusive of SD) is situated by new materials and material forms. The emergence of “modern” Design is concurrent with the emergence of the materials, processes and technologies of mass production and distribution: plastics, metals, molding, modeling, printing, stamping, shipping, replicating, stacking, etc. For the Design of what Reyner Banham called “the first machine age,” industrial materials allowed for the inexpensive distribution of standardized designs to a mass society: new matter provided for a new materialism. Chemistry as much as economics (probably not so divisible at the end of the day) would drive the anthropology of this era’s tangible culture. The periodic table of the elements, innovated by Mendeleev and others, would provide an alphabet for the composition of substance and conjugation of form. In turn, as techniques became schools of thought and designed forms became fixed at certain levels of implementation (type and image, shelter, apparatus, transportation, etc.), modern Design (and Design education) would coalesce around corresponding expertise in graphic design, industrial design, interaction design, architectural design and so on.⁹

Today we confront another gamut of materials that is potentially just as transformative. From biotechnology to the internet of things to artificial intelligence and robotics to networked additive manufacturing and replication, this material palette provides for the recomposition of the world at scales previously unthinkable, turning living tissue into a plastic medium and imbuing inorganic machines and landscapes with new sorts of practical intelligence. The social and ecologic project for SD is not only to master an articulation of these new registers of matter, but also conceive a (real) new Materialism¹⁰ that would ratify the organization of society in the image of their still largely-unmapped potentials.

For Design practice, these material systems are of interest to the extent that they allow for the remaking of that world at a more granular level, and for Design theory to the extent that they disenchant and demystify something about our world and our species within that world. As each of these also now occupies some spot on the curve of various hype cycles, from wondertech to everyday appliance, the incantation of their names supposedly signifies futuristic thinking — even when it actually does not. The flowering of their potential for Promethean demystification and refashioning is not automatic; it must be designated. Still, it should go without saying that technological populism and biochemical futurism are not essentially anti-progressive (and for future Wes Andersons, these emerging technologies will also provide for/thematize a pastoral gizmo authentique yet-to-come).

The longer-term development of SD and related initiatives (not just at UC San Diego where I teach, but anywhere) should formulate its professional, theoretical and pedagogic expertise with this contemporary material palette by putting it in contact with other critical experiments and active geopolitical and geoeconomic contexts. At the same time, the translation of new materials into a new program for social and ecological organization may also direct the sometimes overly self-referential Arts and Humanities toward new outward-facing feats of abstraction, imagination and rationalization.

soon

Notes

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