Among those who have reflected on the character of modernity there is a more or less clear consensus that the age we live in is like a gigantic experiment by the leading technologically competent nations on the topic of the boundless increase in power and the growing intensity of life. In this global experiment, modern persons moving onward from generation to generation discover they are carriers of a specific will to power. It is certainly not true, however, that men with the qualities of Columbus or Descartes, Cosimo or Bacon suddenly emerged as a new ready-made species that had established a predetermined empire of unfettered competence founded on a brutal master plan. The names I have just mentioned are individual symbols of a transpersonal turbulence that escalated into the historic experiment of continuing growth in power and competence. It was not individuals who initiated the great leap made by modern philosophy into the mode of existence of the new competencies. Rather, active people were caught up in an autonomous spiral of increasing competence which was set in motion by the creative spirits of early modern times through recruiting the inventive drive and initiative of these men. To some extent the great names of the early period in the history of European empowerment are the names of experimental apostles, individuals who could be seen as the first people to be appointed for a new global European mission. These men were the bearers of an original apostolate of the power of knowledge that spread with the irresistible force of a triumphant religion, continually producing new calls and inspiring people to new apostolic successions. Modern Europe’s spiral of expanding power and competency can be described as a serial game in which each new generation – starting from the competency level of the older one – added its own particular chapter to the novel that highlighted the epoch. In the context of the play all actors are equal, and in the context of the call to power status distinctions vanished at the beginning of the modern age. Emperors and citizens were simultaneously media of the autonomous power spirals – princes, like engineers, heard the call of new horizons of competence. Plus ultra was the motto of the Habsburg emperor Charles V, and the Spanish fleet crossed the oceans of the early sixteenth century under this banner, which might be claimed as the decisive European slogan of the modern age. Only somebody who shares the feeling of carrying on according to the internal modus operandi of his or her life is a modern European in the precise sense of the term. Subjectivity in its modern form is only possible and true after the pilot individuals of the spiral of modernity have internalized the theme of increase. Compulsion and spontaneity are inseparably interlinked in the will to keep pushing onwards, which means we can no longer say whether the spiral’s dynamic comes from the desire to be competent or the compulsion to be competent. All we know for certain is that its flywheel mass finally becomes more and more subjective, in fact it acquires more and more competency, such that the desire for competency turns into the competency to desire, and the compulsion to be competent turns into the competency to be compelled. In other words, the moment of competence takes priority every time, and the human subject progressively emerges as a person whose actions, knowledge, desire and will are based on a subjective capital stock of competencies. All this is just another way of saying that modern subjects are discrete media of power, obviously not simple power but power with a growth index, power of empowerment, if you like. People who can do something in a modern way can do it so that from the start it involves the idea of and capacity for a growth in competence and a desire to increase skill.
Now, I would like to use these remarks on the increasing dynamic of power and competence to define the character of the present age. It is common in the Western world to say that we are living in a postmodern era. What this means is either an epigonic position in relation to heroic and avant-garde modernism, especially in the arts, or a disillusioned position in relation to exalted ideas of historical planning and control of nature.
If modernity were a composite of genius and constructivism, postmodernism would be a mix of mediocrity and chaos management. I would like to show that these contrasts are not valid from the perspective of the history of competencies. Because above and beyond these two positions, and running right through them, is the unstoppable spiral of increasing power; in fact, we might even see the so-called postmodern age as just one more landmark in the dynamic of empowerment that has accumulated over centuries. What characterizes the postmodern era is the stereotyping of former avant-garde qualities and the transposing of the creativity that was once associated with pathos into everyday manipulation of materials and symbols through the members of a worldwide design civilization – in other words, through the supranational smart new middle layers of society. On this view, modernism and postmodernism are linked by an overwhelming continuity. So-called postmodernism is doubtless also a phase in the history of the Euro-American plus ultra. It has not relaxed the compulsion to power – at most it has adapted the compulsion to be competent to state-of-the-art technology and introduced a degree of play into the contemporary style of competence. There is no sign of a real historic break in the sense of stopping the escalation of competence. As long as a superior power does not blast the spiral of increasing competence it will continue winding on unimpeded as the kinetic core of modernity. Even that which would like to resist it seems to contribute to its thrust; anyone who opposes it just propels it further. Consequently, modernity can only be followed by a further, higher level of modernity. As long as the world is left to pursue its own dynamic, our times have nothing ahead of them except their own continuation and heightening into the unforeseeable future, which will always maintain the same principles – up to limiting values which, we assume, can also be overwritten and extended on and on.
This means that modernity is its own end time and can intrinsically be nothing for itself except its own future source, as long as it continues to be the winding onwards of the competence spiral. In this sense we must understand it as a dynamic millennium. Those who live their lives as genuine participants in the global experiment of the modern age have to account for their spontaneous involvement in a millenary operation; the yet-unvanquished imperial motto has been valid since the sixteenth century in Europe. Regardless of whether we see Columbus or Charles V as the engineer of the Renaissance, or the utopians of the Baroque period as the original apostles of the modernist gospel of competence, we are still following on from them with each statement of life today. Whether we look back for centuries or extrapolate the present into the future, we are first and foremost agents and media for a thousand-year empire of competence.
As far as we know, this turbulent empire is not a comfortable place. In the agitated end time without end, the life of the individual will be defined by a new mood of competitive performance. This will force the individual to evolve into an adaptable biological machine. The individual person, as somebody who is skilled or has competence, must become the channel for the abstract willingness and concrete ability to perform. This individual’s social pride and personal dignity are based on the consciousness of his or her ability to contribute to the rising level of performance as a whole. Individuals in the competence universe must see themselves as relatively sovereign in their sphere of activity. Precisely because of this the modern individual falls into an unavoidable trap, or at least there is no direct way to avoid it. The chasm opens up because the person in the age of increasing competence who is so proud of his or her performance can only occupy an ever smaller, increasingly relativized and specialized position in the general whirl of the competence spiral. Modern experts can do less and less better and better. That they are alert and can mobilize their will and ability on wide horizons is a justified reason for their existential pride; but it is simultaneously the reason for fundamental and unavoidable humiliation. The total mass of competence of the world that has been mobilized for experiments is growing in an exponential relation to the advances in learning made by individual experts. The more competence individuals acquire, the more they are likely to be players in an overall game which inevitably makes their radius of competence – however large – seem insignificant. This paradox of individual competence that simultaneously rises and falls forms the backdrop to the development of the system of modern individualism.
The individualist civilization is faced with the task of rousing the abilities and expectations of the individual sufficiently that the individuals who are spurred on to achievement do not sink into annihilating depression as a result of the unavoidable discovery of their immense all-round incompetence, which is only now becoming visible. Individualism creates the bracing psychosocial climate that provokes and negates the sovereignty of the individual at the same time. It is precisely the dramatic development of this difficult situation that allows a place for the principle of design in the system. For design, seen from an ecological perspective of competence, is nothing but the competent liquidation of incompetence. It secures the individual’s competence limits by providing the subject with processes and gestures for navigating as an expert in the ocean of his or her incompetence. In this respect we may define design as simulation of sovereignty: design is when one is capable despite everything.
I think it is worth exploring the reasons for this in more detail. The reasons, as one can guess from what we have said earlier, are by no means close to the topic as it appears. Martin Heidegger emphasized in his famous dictum that the essence of technology is by no means anything technological,1 and in relation to our topic we must state clearly that the essence of design is nothing like design. I have just defined design as the skill of incompetence, and I would like to proceed by underpinning this formula with some anthropological considerations. The roots of competent incompetence naturally long predate the modern world of competence. In fact, they pass through the whole terrain of primal human history and early cultures. In those times Homo sapiens was a toolmaker and narrator of myths, drifting in hordes and tribes through a reality of Nature that was largely unconquered technologically and unexplored in analytical terms.
For early humans, not being competent – not being able to do much and not being able to change much in relation to their environment – was almost first nature, at least compared to the power radius of late culture. All the same, early humans were anything but helpless victims swamped with fear of an overwhelming world outside. On the contrary, they were lively, inventive, highly mobile actors in a survival game they played with great success, even if they could only have dreamed of the competence horizon of an average modern individual as if it were an existence under divine protection. If their forms of life seem like cultures of sheer impotence from today’s perspective, it is because of an optical illusion. In reality, modern human beings’ range of competence has expanded so much that they are far more at risk of helplessness than prehistoric human beings. They are more often at risk of failing through incompetence, and on more fronts. Early humans, by contrast, benefited from having a grasp of almost everything they needed for their personal and social sustenance, while they managed everything they lacked the skills for more or less routinely with the protection of rituals.
Assuming that the Flood falls from the sky with thunder and lightning on your roof of leaves, if you can survive the storm at all you can survive it better if you chant a song for the weather god. It is not important to be able to make the weather yourself – even modern abilities do not go that far –, but it is important to know a technique for keeping fit in bad weather. You must be competent enough to be able to do something in a situation when one usually cannot do anything. Only someone who knows what to do when there is nothing to be done knows enough efficient and continuing games of life to prevent himself or herself from collapsing in panic or freezing into immobility. Skilful lack of competence creates a kind of freewheeling attitude or a parallel process in which life can go on even in the presence of things that make us helpless. I use the term ‘ritual’, a term from ethnology and science of religion, for such parallel processes. Prehistoric people could not be entirely sure whether the sun really rose as a result of their waking before it and encouraging it to rise by dancing in a circle; but this enabled them to deal with the demons of the dawn and thus to enter their day playfully and keep their mythical identity as children of the light planet and the dark earth. Since archaic times, ritual has closed the gap through which impotence, panic and death invade our life. In this sense we can talk of the birth of design out of the spirit of ritual. For although design is unmistakably a modern development and is manifested in things rather than in gestures, its gestural substrate – competence when skills are lacking, keeping fit, preserving form in the midst of things that dissolve form – still prefigures in primeval history the parallel gestural and symbolic actions that we call ritual. Without having a causal effect on events in the autonomous environment, rituals give coherence to the lives of their practitioners as they are lived and, if they are properly understood, have the power to bring order into a world that cannot generally be controlled. Extra ritum nulla salus. Above all, even we modern individuals have retained remnants of ritual competence for the unmanageable, watershed events of life – particularly the death of people close to us. Such rituals allow people, parallel to the event they cannot control, to continue dealing with their own life’s drama through minimal patterns that show the right way to carry on and cope with things. The same applies to births and birthdays, weddings and separations, the transition from the old to the new year, and jubilees. They are thresholds built over remnants of rituals whose transgression requires a minimum of formal fitness. Rituals, as elementary game rules and sources of form, provide the gestural repertoire for this.
From here it is not difficult to return to the present structures of design-based management of incompetence. If necessary, a coat of paint will always do the trick. When a Swissair plane crashed at Athens Airport in the 1970s, aside from the obvious rescue procedures for the survivors and dead passengers, the airline also oddly instructed an airport worker to go to the spot immediately and paint over the clearly visible and identifiable Swissair logo on the tail of the plane that was protruding above the wreckage. You might call this first aid for a wrecked firm logo. It shows precisely what design can and will do in extreme cases: the overpainting of the tail proves that we can always do something when there is nothing more to do.
It would be meaningless and frivolous, however, to derive the design question solely from the type of incompetence catastrophe I have just described. After all, dealing competently with relationships and devices for which we cannot be perfectly competent occupies a disproportionate part of our modern professional life and daily leisure time. For the average user, all the technical systems that function on the basis of sophisticated precision engineering, burning technology, nuclear technology, electricity and electronics are completely obscure entities. All the same, our daily life has long since been organized in relation to such technologies. The principal machines of today’s world, the car, the computer, the entire range of consumer electronics, sophisticated tools and suchlike – for the great majority of users they are all just shiny surfaces whose interior worlds are impossible to enter except in an amateurish, destructive way.
In traditional rhetoric one would speak of books with seven seals, while in modern-day terms such impenetrable, complex blocks in the users’ environment are called black boxes. After the technological revolution the sphere of individual life is full of such devices that allow apparently magical telepathic operations – such as remote listening from a distance, watching TV, telephoning, remote control steering, remote reading – operations that are all based on internal working processes that have no relation to the user. Design is unavoidably involved wherever the black box has to offer the user a contact interface to make it usable regardless of its hermetic internal nature. Design creates an open exterior for the dark box of puzzles. We could call these user interfaces the face of the boxes. They are the make-up of the machines. They simulate a kind of kinship between the human being and the box and they whisper in the user’s ear, arousing appetite, desire for contact, sensations of handiness, and initiatives. The more incomprehensible and transcendent the interior life of the box is, the more appealingly the box face has to smile at the natural face of the customer and signal to him or her: ‘We can get on together, you and I; I’m not hiding any of my sensitive spots from you; my PVC physiognomy expresses my genuine sympathy and I’m ready to serve you.’ Design helps to inspire the belief that a man and his electric shaver are male team comrades, almost the same as the housewife and her washing machine. When it comes to complex devices, design creates the façade of signs and contact points that enables users to join the game without being tangibly humiliated by their evident incompetence as regards the internal mechanisms. From the user’s perspective, ignorance must become power. I send faxes, therefore I am; I use a mobile telephone, therefore I adjust to the network. The universe of product design revolves largely around the sensitive issue of serving the competence needs of users who are incompetent in dealing with structures. From this perspective a customer is always an idiot who wants to purchase sovereignty. And the designer, in strategic alliance with the manufacturers and experts for the interior of the black boxes, is always poised to introduce new applications or follow-ups into the sovereignty market. Modern customers, as users of unexamined technology, are everyday imposters: illuminators with toggle switches and dimmers, telepathy artists with fax machines, kinetic jugglers at the wheel of a car, and masters of levitation in a passenger plane. And in the sense that all of these obscure technical objects would not be the way they are without the contribution of designers, we can describe the profession of designer as that of an outfitter for imposters. Designers furnish everyday imposters like myself and everybody else with the accessories for continuing simulations of sovereignty.
In everyday language we call the same products ‘useful aids to make life easier’. This service has models and relations in a sphere that seems very far removed from the technical element, and, in fact, contrary to it: the rhetoric and grammar teachings of Antiquity and the teachings of the aristocratic age in dance and manners. Both provided training in linguistic and physical attitudes that spared individuals from being lost for words and losing their stability in free-fall situations. When there is no longer any suitable word, there is still always a word in place; where everything stable has collapsed, good behaviour is still possible. Design repeats these provisions with sovereign means of control in the horizon of a technological civilization. It provides the technical stuff for power for people who try to appear as something more than helpless puppets of competence amid the present monstrous spiralling of power. Whether this attempt can succeed is today the source of argument between the humanist and technically oriented factions of cultural criticism.
Having discussed how design was born out of the spirit of ritual, we must talk about a second, specifically modern source of design-civilization. The way the modern world works as an experimental culture is the practical conclusion of the belief that things are not beings or creatures, but functions or materialized acts. If things were beings in their own right and origin – things of God’s grace, in a sense –, trying to lay hands on them would be latently or manifestly blasphemous; every design, insofar as design means drawing things in a new way, would be a rebellion against the created or naturally born essence. If things, however, are carriers of functions, then they are not protected and sanctified by any original seal, and are inherently open to constant improvement and re-creation.
In this sense, design as an attitude and profession is rooted in the elementary revisionism of pragmatic modernity; but revision is meliorism: re-making means improving. In other words, design is the conclusive form of functionalism – people who make designs admit to being practising functionalists; they are committers of the verb ‘to function’, apostles of the belief in the primacy of function over structure that has been missionized worldwide. Stepping back from such self-evident statements and questioning the meaning of these all too illuminating expressions, we reach a terrain where the relationship between the thing and its function or the function and its thing becomes visible in a very dubious manner. In his notoriously obscure oration about ‘the thing’, Heidegger explained the questions asked here using the example of a jug. Briefly, the function of the jug is revealed in its suitability for the task of holding water or wine in its hollow interior and standing ready for pouring – which is why its appearance combines the three characteristics of hollow body, handle and spout. It would follow that the function of the thing is simply its service or use. Leading on from this example, generally speaking things are useful tools to hand. But as serviceable tools, things are simultaneously discreetly sovereign donors – giving beings, we could say, in the hands of living beings. This is particularly clear in the case of the jug. The jug is there to do the job of pouring, which means that as an example it shows directly how this thing, by serving, also gives. One must admit that Heidegger was right in seeing no reason to flinch at the statement that the essential character of the jug is to give. From here it is only a small step to the main principle of the ontology of things that says the essence of the thing as such is the gift of pouring. This surprising theorem brings us to a double-sided understanding of things: one side places the functional service of the thing at the beginning, and leads from there to the human being as master and user, while the other side starts from the character of the thing as a gift and defines human beings as recipients of gifts of things.2 By its tone and logic the second view is naturally at home in a premodern interpretation of the world and being, because instead of serving people’s desire for multiple competence it reminds us of the gratitude they owe to the things that give themselves. Quite simply, it delineates the position of anti-design. A person who implements it in the literal sense would not be somebody in search of sovereignty, a competent-incompetent user of the tool for power, but somebody who meditates and is pious about things, a recipient of gifts in kind in the form of tools, material and foods. Cum grano salis this would resemble Catholic artisans’ and farmers’ philosophy in which the proper use of any tools or machines always begins with a prayer about the things, in the same way as meals begin with saying grace.
No designer has ever emerged in this manner. Designers may believe what they like about themselves but they are not God’s henchmen and not labourers in the vineyard of being. A designer cannot regard himself or herself only as a curator of what is already there. All design stems from an anti-prayer; it begins with the decision to pose the question of the form and function of things in a new way. The sovereign person is the one who decides on the exception to the rule in questions of form. And when it comes to the form of things, design is the permanent exceptional state – it explains an end to modesty in relation to how things are traditionally constituted, and the spirit of radically questioning the function of a thing and its masters and users is manifested in the will to create new versions of all things. Every kind of functionalism contains a spark of Luddite prejudice against objects. Whereas we are not supposed to think about the price when we receive a gift, the designer object is open to pricing questions and revisions from the start. Instead of taking the thing as it is, design begins with the function and turns the thing into a variable fulfilment of it. Design is possible because and to the extent that we can apply the dictum that each thing has its price.
In fact, the history of how design has risen to become the almost unchecked ruler of the new version of things has to be written in an economic mode as well. For what we describe here in ontological jargon as a ‘thing’ is called a ‘product’ in economic parlance. A thing that carries value is a commodity. If a thing with value is put on the market to compete with other things of the same type, the product, if it is willing and able to achieve success, will become a comparatively better commodity in competition with its peers – in other words, it will shift from being a commodity, or goods, to being an improvement, or a better thing. At first glance this may merely seem like wordplay, but on closer inspection it is the valid term for the dynamically charged value object. The commodity that has improved as a thing of value seeking success has a dynamic way of being on the market that means it is already, as such, a thing that seeks comparison to make it look even better. We could say that it obeys the categorical imperative: always present your image on the commodity market in such a way that the theme of your existence can be understood at any time as expressing and motivating the effort of improvement. Because designer goods as such are now presented as embodiments of the demand for excellence in opposition to rival commodities, they are, as it were, the real existing comparatives of things. From an ideal-typical perspective, in the modernized product world there is no longer a market trend for static commodities but only one for improvements – there are no stable qualities but only products that surpass and enhance. The revisionist approach to things in design is articulated precisely at the intersection between experiment and competition, between functional improvement and improved utilization. These two improvements are complemented by a third, if we take into account that a design object seldom, in fact never, comes alone. Each individual design object profits from closeness to its own kind – it adopts an atmospheric added value that stems from the family resemblance to related products that have been optimized, stylized, freshly conceived, further elaborated and exaggerated; in other words, improvements. The critical theory of product ranges is concerned with improvement groups. But whether seen in an ensemble or as a single item, after rejuvenation in design the thing is always a comparative object – it is the successor of an ousted or surpassed thing, the result of an optimization story that is open-ended in relation to the future.
If, as we have said, the designer in the role of Homo aestheticus and psychologicus is a provider of simulations of sovereignty, he is also, as Homo oeconomicus, the outfitter for goods on the path to improvement; he is the man of the unconditional comparative – a development aid worker for trending things. He could be described as an all-rounder for revisions of things. He acts in this capacity as a rigger, a military parachute packer, for the power struggles of owners of variable capital that circulates in the form of ‘improvement products’. And just as the present world market actually rewards improvement, design becomes not only one success factor among others but, what is more, a basic element of and a nutrient solution for modernized success, meaning more cleverly made success, in its own right.
After ritual and capital, we should mention a third source that makes design meaningful in the present arena of power. The key word is applied art. I do not wish to embark on an excursion at this point into the swamplands of theories of modern art. Nor shall I consider the classic Marxist idea of product aesthetics and the liberal catchword ‘consumer aesthetics’. I shall also ignore the ‘role of the aesthetic in the apparent solution of fundamental contradictions of capitalist society’3 – after all, we are no longer in the 1970s. I assume we know how designers contribute to adding surplus value in packaging and presentation as cosmetic artists of products. We also know that pseudo-improvements, the pretence of quality differences and creating the illusion of customer choice have long since been problematic domains of design as applied art that has gone astray, and this is a premise I can introduce here without further commentary. In a culture of identity, difference necessarily becomes a scarce resource. In relation to applied art, as everybody knows, difference not only is a contact ground for encounters between beauty and technologies, but also epitomizes processes to regenerate the semblance of the beautiful life. In this respect applied art is a privileged access to the dream factories whose contribution is vital to sustain the complicated psycho-political machinery of modern mass societies. Even critics of ideology now accept the idea that modernity is just another name for the difficult job of finding the right balance between deconstruction and construction of illusions. It follows that design as applied art is always a regulator in the subjective ecology of individualistic civilization; it provides the air conditioning for nervous large-scale societies and contributes to the fine tuning of systems that create illusions and flair. It motivates and tones the players in the lotteries of the society that prioritizes performance and experience by the widest possible distribution of the sovereignty premium together with its methods of simulation. Everyone should have access to that winning feeling – this is the rule for inclusive games. As long as democratic concepts take the lead in advanced illusion design, technological progress will seem like a lottery to many people, if not everyone. On this note, the French railway company SNCF presented its high-speed policy to the population with the slogan: Le progrès ne vaut que s’il est partagé par tous. [Progress is only worthwhile if everyone shares in it.]
On the reverse side of this generous illusionism, however, is a growing atmosphere of harsh rationality. Its signs haunt every medium and the trendsetting press has been broadcasting exclusively on this wavelength for a long time now. Applied art – combined with a new absence of illusions into exclusive games – results in the modernization of egoism, and it is this effect of this new mass-scale self-designing that brought a chill breeze to the postmodern illusion-hothouse of the West in the period before 2000. Design as art applied to the ego creates smart managers with the latest bundle of competencies combining speed, information, irony, taste and cool ruthlessness. The one-time avant-garde idea of making a work of art out of the life of the individual itself has now, after a delay of barely three generations, reached the grass roots of society. What is called ‘lifestyle’ is the breakthrough of design to the level of self-stylization and personal biographies. Nowadays the individual aims for the competency to present himself or herself as a compromise between artwork and machine – rather like Andy Warhol, who has long been seen worldwide as the patriarch of design-supported neo-individualism. Subsequent generations have learned from Warhol that sovereignty is an effect of the investment of energy in shallow processes. And if individuals in the age of design want to apply shallow processes to their own body, then we should prepare for a new psychosocial era, and perhaps even an anthropological quantum leap. If our picture of the trend doesn’t deceive us, this will necessarily result in a structural transformation in the traditional human image, and may even shape new psycho-physiological and neuronal processes. It seems as if a type of Homo semioticus will replace the highly cultivated Homo psychologicus. The manifest carriers of this development are already adults, our children, our mutants; in their case the classical ‘deep’ triad of psyche, memory and inner world has been replaced by the new plane of operator, memory store and on-screen space. The ‘soul in the technological age’ could become something like a living cursor in busy spaces where events happen – a cursor in search of its course, a runner in search of the track that would be his or her ‘own’.
However we may judge such hypothetical tendencies, what matters is that design in all of its three roots is involved in a kind of psycho-political battle of the Titans4 in which the forces of hope and the forces of despair are wrestling with each other like two global powers or total atmospheres. In this respect the collapse of communism certainly did not end what was called the bipolar era. At best we can say that the superfluous battle of the Titans, the East–West bipolarity, has finally vanished to make way for the necessary battle of the Titans, the fateful conflict throughout humanity between confidence, along with what gives it justifications, and despair, along with what nourishes it. It is the struggle for the raison d’être of a human race that has had to learn to look rationally at its relationships while modernizing. This bipolarity encompasses all contemporary works and arts; in the battle of motives that give reason for hope or drive people to despair, the life impulses of present and future generations come into their own – or dissolve into nothing. On the whole the media have failed to understand this psychodynamic endgame of species intelligence, although they have all been shouting wildly like warriors in the fog. The political class, too, has barely understood it, although it has long since been operating on the battlefield itself with rather confused manoeuvres. No institute of strategic studies has ever wasted a word on the course of this ultimate psycho-political drama, let alone risked a hypothesis on its outcome. The intelligentsia is under a curious spell that prevents it from appropriately fulfilling its office as world witness. It is evidently still too difficult for people today to be combatants and observers at the same time in the middle of a battle of the Titans. The rule seems to be that those who see do not fight and those who fight do not see. And yet it is high time for a visionary combat and combative vision – particularly because hardly anyone still knows, or can know, to which side of the battle he or she was actually recruited. This is the frame for the current crisis of vision that everybody is talking about.
The view as such is clouded in the confused battle of the Titans. One person’s reason for confidence is another’s cause of despair; one person’s cause of despair is another’s reason for confidence. Even the last bipolarity has its dead spaces and no man’s lands; double agents lose their way between the fronts, and the scenarios of the world war in the depths are hidden behind clouds of ambiguity. But wherever ambivalence holds sway, design is not far off. Designers are also make-up artists for bottomless confidence and creators of simulation methods for illusory hopes and false escapes. They are the crack troops of double agents in the battle of the Titans, working with confidence on new things fit for the future and running blindly and desperately along the same old path in a panic of self-preservation. They agree with both sides and equip them with signs and devices. Designers, as members of the indecisive class par excellence, are simultaneously providers of toys for the last humans and inventors of tools supposed to prove their worth in future workshops. But their indecisiveness is not a mood or a personal weakness. It reflects the state of all competent authorities at this present moment of the world. It shows that we do not currently know what competencies a person must be equipped with to avoid creating further causes of despair.