Dear Klaus, Tina, Jurgen and all,
I wasn't writing about discontinuities in terms of discourse.
That's a different direction and different topic.
Best wishes,
Terry
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Dr Terence Love
PhD (UWA), B.A. (Hons) Engin, PGCE. FDRS, AMIMechE, MISI
Director,
Love Services Pty Ltd
PO Box 226, Quinns Rocks Western Australia 6030
Tel: +61 (0)4 3497 5848
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-----Original Message-----
From: [log in to unmask] [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Klaus Krippendorff
Sent: Sunday, 9 March 2014 2:31 AM
To: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design
Subject: RE: The study of 'discontinuities' as a useful tool in design theory
hi jürgen, keith, and terry,
i just don’t have the time to respond to all the ideas that enter the stream of messages on this list, but i can't resist making a brief comment on the issue of discourse. i since 1994, http://repository.upenn.edu/asc_papers/46 i have written much on the subject. in my semantic turn p. 23-25 i merely define design discourse. but elsewhere i have written of discourses more generally, their discontinuities, what holds their formation together, and the ecology of the resulting discursive struggles.
foucault was certainly a pioneer in discourse analysis. my dissatisfaction with his notion is that he developed his theory primarily from written texts, and imports a metaphor from physics, power, to ascribe relationships between different ways of articulating.
my notion of discourse is human-centered. it acknowledges texts, of course, but as one side of the artifacts that discourses create. for design discourse, these artifacts include not just design theory but also the designs it realizes. the artifacts of physics are particular constructions of reality (causal theories without reference to observers, and experiments that verify them within the standards of physics). the artifacts of the legal discourse are categorizations of what is legal and illegal, including punishments of declared criminals and deciding on a corporation’s financial obligations. to me discursive artifacts do not stay in language. they are enacted and may well have consequences that are not recognizable and articulable by the discourse that creates them, hence the need for other discourses.
what foucault omits is
· the discourse communities of practitioners that keep a discourse alive by rearticulating its artifacts and adding new ones
· the institutions adopted by a discourse community that assure its transmission (publications), upholding standards (validation), education of newcomers, etc.
· the effort of any discourse community to draw and maintain the boundary of its own discourse, creating distinct and autonomous disciplines
· the need for any discourse to justify its practices to others who have a stake in that discourses whether as customers, potential students, or competing discourses.
i realize that foucault also talks of boundaries drawn by a discourse, such as by archeology – incidentally archeology does not describe culture, it constructs cultures.. but describing the relations between discourses in terms of analogy, opposition, or complementation reveals foucault’s effort to be above them all, taking them as texts, without interest in observing the actual (in the sense of being enacted) struggles between discourses. think about the historical struggle between the discourses of religion and of science, or about what has concerned me, the effort of marketing to usurp design as one of its branches, or of engineering conceptions intruding into human-centered design.
terry distinguishes between problems that a design discourse can solve and others that it cannot. this is fair enough. the discourse-centered or discourse-logical solution of what this this distinction creates is to declare such situations unsolvable. its imperialist solution is to export design theory to other discourses (terry’s call for two distinct design theories as design theories nevertheless). its discourse-ecological solution is for design discourse to create openings to cooperate with other discourses. to me, this includes what i thought keith was driving at namely the possibility of design to be disruptive.
klaus
-----Original Message-----
From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Prof. Jürgen Faust
Sent: Saturday, March 08, 2014 9:23 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: The study of 'discontinuities' as a useful tool in design theory
Hi Terry,
thank you for this input and important aspect within design theory.
I have worked with the problem of discontinuity by myself over the past years and didn't come to a final conclusion. Your way to put it, gives me a new perspective and many questions. Actually as many will know on this list that discontinuity within discourse was originated by Foucault (1972).
I have summarized some key elements from his discourse about discontinuity in a part of my PHD research: Discontinuity is characteristic of every discursive statement and dispersion is the reality underlying all discursive statements. He (Foucault) defines ‘discourse’ as any group of statements, which belong to a single system of formation. However, not all types of discontinuity can be ignored. Discursive formations, according to Foucault, are groups of statements, which may have any order, correlation, position, or function, as determined by this disunity. A discourse can thus be a historical event or an archive of historical statements. The relations between discursive formations may include analogy, opposition, or complementation. Discursive formations may also determine each other's limits or boundaries. Archaeological description is concerned with the rules and principles that may be specific to discursive formations and to discourse itself. Archaeological descriptions, thus, have a diversifying, rather than unifying, effect on our understanding of discursive statements. Hence, in trying to understand the formation and development of discourse, we must abandon our pre-existing notions of unity (Foucault 1972).
The question is now, how do you transfer discontinuity from statements into design activity, design theory and philosophy of design (in philosophy here it is obviously well placed), without falling into the trap of constructing continuity again?
Continuity appears from my perspective as well when we are constructing relations. Putting things together which don't belong together, similar as you therefore are separating the 'discontinuity boundary between Conventional Design (simple and complicated situations) and Complex Design (complex and chaotic situations)' in your paper.
If I use this Foucault frame of discontinuity then I would say that the design discourse is a a discontinuous field of research, crosses into other disciplines and it is equally important to describe the way the statements are dispersed across such various disciplines.
Foucault (1972) notes that ‘statements different in form, and dispersed in time, form a group of statement if the refer to one and the same object’ (p.32).
‘Instead of reconstituting chains of inference (as often does in the history of sciences or of philosophy), instead of drawing up tables of differences (as the linguists do) it would describe the systems of dispersion’ (Foucault 1972, p.37).
Thank you Terence.
Jurgen Faust
Professor für Digitale Medien macromedia hochschule für medien und kommunikation
Foucault, Michel. The Archeology of Knowledge & the Discourse on Language. Translated by A M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972.
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